Idioma original: Español
Year of publication: 2024
Valuation: Alright
“All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Leo Tolstoy
This may be one of the most popular beginnings in the history of literature and could work as a summary of Posthumous farewells because this is the story of the brothers Marcelo and Sofía Martín-Santos Benedet and, by extension, the history of the family over the last 100 years.
The whole novel is built on contrasts: between the Martín-Santos (father’s family) and the Benedet (mother’s family), between Sofía and Marcelo, between national Spain and republican Spain, between the values of one side of history and the other. Revisited in some way, but the eternal dichotomy “civilization” or “barbarism.”
This contrast is not only thematic because Posthumous farewells It is constructed, formally, based on the use of the present and the past in which the “story within the story” takes place, which occupies the center of the novel and which reveals shared memories and forgetfulness, revelations, loneliness and lack of communication that mark lives.
On the positive side of the scale of this novel we will place:
- its Proustian part, especially in the chapter entitled “Journey”. In fact, at least in the initial part of the novel, Benibaite could be Marcel Proust’s Balbec. Although later on…
- his portrait of the Valencian upper bourgeoisie in a well-drawn secondary plot (or not so well) that is related to Chirbes’s Crematorio.
- the dialogues, which are generally agile and credible.
On the less good side we must mention:
- the author’s tendency to over-adjectivize.
- There is a certain Manichaeism in the characters. In my opinion, they are too archetypal and a wider range of greys is missing.
- Linked in some way to the above, I think that the most “pamphlet-like” part eats up the novel, especially in its central part.
- some parts are too “Paulocoelhesque”. I understand the characters’ situation, but the text sometimes borders on a self-help manual.
In short, a novel that starts from a good premise, takes detours that combine successes and failures and is, overall, somewhat irregular.
Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2024/07/sergio-villanueva-los-adioses-postumos.html
