Beautifully written on the sentence level, heartbreaking in its content, this short story collection speaks of what is left unsaid in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. At times it left me in tears, then it left me puzzled. I wasn't sure if some things just went over my head, because I lacked the background knowledge, or whether it was deliberately confusing to highlight the unspeakable.
I'd definitely recommend this to some of my friends, but I think it requires a reader with specific interests in both history and lyrical language.

Beautifully written literary fiction that drew me in kept me turning the pages.A book that kept me turning the pages enjoying the stories,#netgalley#archipelego

Sweet, touching, deceptively simply written - yet at other times jaw droppingly poetic. I loved these vignettes. The story about the dog in the camp made me cry.

Definitely different and very well-written. A collection of short stories. Complicated yet compelling. Intelligent stuff. Recommended reading with concentration.

The style of most of these stories was almost self-consciously poetic which got in the way of the narratives. Although I usually like Archipelago's choices and applaud their issuing previously untranslated works into English, I thought this was a bit too mannered for my taste. Then again, it may have been the fault of the translation.

"The sky was dull. Amidst the thorn bushes the men were drying themselves with the torn rags of their lost republic. The language of the North had traveled upriver, following paths that moons ate up along with with iron insects. Hope was a locked book of water opened from time to time by a lightning bolt. La Cega’s language was as secret as a key, an egg, a knife."

This is a collection of short stories, many of them linked, and I have included the quote above to give an idea of the prose style which is very unusual. The style of writing here manages to be childlike and complexly allusive simultaneously. It often feels like a dream rather than reality and several passages appear simple on first reading but call you back for a second or third look, at which point they begin to reveal hidden complexities.

The stories give us a series of vignettes that focus on the lives of refugees from the Spanish Civil War who fled from Catalonia to Southern France only to be put into prison camps when they arrived. Some of the stories are gritty and seem very real. Others are real on the face of it, but head into more surreal territory and appear more like hallucinations or nightmares. There’s the story of how a woman uses the arrangement of clothes on her washing line to communicate secret messages to compatriots. There’s the story of a library of books all placed on the shelves the “wrong” way round: books hidden in plain sight. There’s the man whose orchard of trees has each tree named for an individual. It isn’t spelled out for us, but we realise the books are forbidden books and the individuals are assassinated comrades.

These are stories of refugees and immigrants. None of the stories is long, but they build together into a meditation. You put the book down realising you have read, in the subtlest way, about rebellion, courage and survival.

Hmmm… Don't come here for fully narrative, coherent short stories, even if a few times you get something approaching that – a look at what doing the laundry in a Civil War might mean, or an anecdote of vintage cinema trips. Elsewhere what we have is a selection of scenes, briefly described situations or other excerpts that together combine to give a picture of Spain more or less a lifetime ago. You get to see that characters return from section to section, and that references in one are made a little clearer by another. This then becomes a picture of hardship, mountains and valleys with their own little secrets, and an endless sense of the other, in this case the enemy. Mind you, talk of a medicine man and his scorpion tea, and eventful situations in concentration camps are rarefied and 'the other' without any effort from the author. My favourite was a late entry, regarding a kind of Schroedinger's Bench, but several sections bear consideration as very strong pieces of this particular jigsaw. Finally, it's not exclusively and indefinably about the Spanish Civil War, so the mood of the stories can appeal to the completely ignorant about that subject, such as me. Three and a half stars, in light of the more memorable titles present.