The Yellow Rain [Hardcover]

No matter how I tried, I could not enjoy this book. I love ghost towns, ruins, sequestered villages and have logged many travel miles to visit them. This book should have been right up my cobblestone alley. Unfortunately, it is a very boring read. There isn't much description of the town beyond everything is crumbling and rotting away, there is no glimpse into the village's hey-day so we really have no sense of loss, just a drawn-out, really dull account of the last few years of the town. It's like listening to someone on his deathbed moan and groan for days on end until you know it would be a mercy for him to die. There's just no atmosphere, no nostalgia, no--as I said--genuine sense of loss.

To top it all off, the book is full of dumb cliches (some cliches ARE dumber than others), like "I was staring death in the face" or "death was laughing at me", etc. I really wondered how this thing made it into print. There's no story, not a hint of humor, no characters that come off the pages, really nothing to get attached to. I couldn't even read it all the way through although its not even 150 pages long and the type is BIG. All I can say is if you enjoy forlorn places, as I do, and you enjoy history brought to life--or at least to art--you will be really disappointed with this one.

(...)It is neither elegaic, nor lyrical, nor in any sense compelling. I've been reviewing books professionally for 20 years and this is one of the worst I've ever had to plow through. Only 130 pages long, it still manages to be incredibly tedious. Most absurd are comparisons first to Jose Saramago, and, more absurd, to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I don't have a word strong enough--ludicrous comes up way short--to apply to the assertion that Llamazares is "more lyrical" than Marquez. We all know talk is cheap, so here is an example of the overwrought and image-less writing: "Almost instantaneously, I was filled by an inexplicable inner chill. The house was frozen, heavy with menace, thick with silence and dank cold." [Could an outer chill fill anyone?] This is not elegaic, it's cheap gothic--without the fun of suspense or any genuine sense of menace. One line later, "The darkness was absolute, filling my eyes like a curse." Not only is this badly done, but also, Llamazres already used this metaphor five pages earlier: "I still had the rope with me, tied around my waist, like a rough belt or like a curse." And he will use it AGAIN later in the novel. Saramago? Marquez? This book is so badly written it is a wonder it was published at all. Llamazares uses the words silence, solitude, shadow, forever, dream, night, soul and memories--among others--so often, you begin to cringe in anticipation. Madness, for example "laid its yellow larvae in my soul" (p. 40). A rope (the one like a curse) "made an inferno of my soul" (p. 38). On p. 25, the curse-like rope made "an abyss of my soul." Need I go on? These are general and abstract words symptomatic of the writing: it lacks texture, feel, detail, LIFE.

Beyond the bad writing, however, there is NO story nor any characters! The narrator spends 130 pages whining about how he's about to die and the village is going to die with him, but we don't know anything else about him. We never see him or his family members (who are mere ciphers, names without anecdtoes or even physical descriptions attached to them) or the town in happier times so we really can't care much what happens to them. NO ONE in the whole book gets a single description. I don't think we even know what the dog looks like. We do see something of the town, but we know nothing, after 130 pages of its history or character. The Macondo of Marquez is more vividly drawn in a single paragraph of '100 Years of Solitude'.

Worst of all is the narrator's voice. Far from lyrical or elegaic, it is self-pitying, complaining and incredibly repetitive. If Llamazares only made his observations once (and they are hardly original or thought provoking), the book would be about 50 pages long. By the time you turn the last page, you are thankful, more than anything else, his ordeal--and yours--is over.

I found nothing redeeming between these covers and would not have gone past page 5 had I not been commissioned assignment.

You've been warned.

This book, a compelling and poignant elegy to both a vanished village and dying way of life, is one of the most beautifully written and sorrowful books I have ever read on the power of memory. Andres, the last surviving inhabitant of Ainielle, a small village in the Spanish Pyrenees, has been alone for years, with only his loyal dog, and the ghosts of his family and fellow villagers, for company. On what he believes to be his last day on earth, he recounts the slow, steady decay of his home and his village, the loss of his friends and family, and in the process tells us much about himself. The "yellow rain" of the Poplar leaves is compared to both time -- "like a patient yellow rain that . . .douses the fiercest of fires" -- and death. As he watches his village die, Andres laments the loss of his own life as well. His entire life has been one of loss -- of his young daughter to disease, of one son to the Civil War and another who leaves, never to be forgiven or come back, and of his wife, to suicide. What she cannot bear, Andres stubbornly suffers through. He loves his village as he loved his family, but is powerless to stop its destruction by nature and time. And ultimately he knows that he, too, must die, ultimately becoming a part of the past. Though the images of destruction and decay are strong and ominpresent, they nonetheless mingle with those of rebirth and growth; the life cycle is complete. The nature that destroys during the winter also comes alive again each spring.

Andres comes to accept the fact that the ghosts of his past now dwell with him, and he himself then becomes a ghost, wandering through the streets of the old village and its surrounding hills, sometimes losing himself in time and place. He knows that his life is over and he finally comes to accept the loss of hope that his village will ever revive.

This book is beautifully written -- the language poetic and rich, the symbols and images both stark and gently evocative. The past dwells with Andres, as it does for all of us, in the present, living on in memory and in dreams.

My Spanish is not good enough to read Mr. Llamazares in his native tongue, so I can only hope that, in the future, there will be other translations of his works for me to read. This lovely little book is a perfect introduction to his writing.