Galveias, by José Luís Peixoto

Títutulus original: Galveies

Translators: Pilar del Río and Antonio Sáez Delgado

Year of publication: 2016

Valoración: Highly recommended

So far, so close. We get very little information about the literature that is being done in Portugal and we can barely name writers from that country apart from Saramago and Pessoa. We are in time to remedy that ignorance and perhaps this excellent book by Peixoto can contribute to remedy.

The Portuguese writer proposes in this book a coral novel by which the lives of the inhabitants of a town of the Portuguese Alentejo, Galveias, whose day to day is shaken by the impact of a meteorite that permeates the smell of smell the atmosphere of the place.

The anecdote of the meteorite takes advantage, almost a McGuffin in the manner of Hitchcock, to go by renovating chapter by chapter the experiences of an endearing gallery of characters that, with their joys and misery, make up a universe of lives that are interwoven and whose sum constitutes the collective soul of the people.

The rhythm of the narrative is deliberately slow. The Portuguese author intends to integrate into the daily atmosphere of the people through the small details of the lives of its inhabitants that in almost all cases begin being private, almost secret matters, but that end up involving the rest of the community. All this with a thorough, poetic language, treating with great humanity some characters who, in most cases, were born and dyed in the people and that raise their life as a matter of survival and an adaptation to the circumstances that have had to live using the few resources they have within their reach.

It is worth recreating in a fragment, a reflection of one of the characters in which he describes his place in the world and in which we can glimpse the wealth of narrative language in which Peixoto moves: “We all have a place where life is adjusted. Each world has a center. My site is not better than yours, it is not more important. Our sites cannot be compared because they are too intimate. Where there are only we can see them. It is not worth explaining our site, nobody will understand it. The words do not support the weight of that truth, fertile earth that comes from the most remote past, spring that extends to the future without death.”

Signed: José Miguel Martínez