Bøger af Rafael Chirbes

Third and last volume of Rafael Chirbes' essential diaries, the culmination of a literary event... Here are the annotations from various notebooks written between 2007 and 2015, the period in which he published the two novels that mark the culmination of his literary career -Crematorium and On the shore- and in his last years of life, marked by illness. The doubts and crises in the writing of these fundamental works, the conversations with their Barcelona publisher, the repercussions of the publication and some disagreements with the press, the tolls of literary life and some very acid comments on various contemporary writers appear on these pages. It is also very present, as in the previous installments, the voracious reader, passionate both in his enthusiasms and in his rejections, who reads the classics and his contemporaries.

Along the Mediterranean coastline of Spain, real-estate developers scramble to transform the once pastoral landscape into tourist resorts, nightclubs, and beachfront properties with lavish bars and pools. The booming post-Franco years have left everything up for grabs. Cremation opens with the death of Matías, a paterfamilias who had rejected all of these changes and whose passing sets off a chain reaction, uncovering a past that had been buried for years, and leading those closest to him to question the paths they've chosen.      In a rich mosaic narrative, filled with a hypnotic chorus of voices, Cremation explores the coked-up champagne fizz of luxurious parties shadowed by underworlds of political corruption, prostitution, and ruthless financial speculation. The novel enters that melancholy ouroboros of capitalist greed that led to the financial crash and captures something essential about our values, our choices, and our all too human mistakes. Like William Faulkner or Francis Bacon, Chirbes stares, clear-eyed, into the abyss, and portrays us as we really are.