Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

I made multiple attempts to read this but couldn't engage with the story or any of the characters. Just not for me.

Review not posted anywhere else.

DNF.
I received an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author.
I persevered through a third of this book before having to abandon it. I have a new resolution to put down books I am not enjoying, as life is too short.
I can absolutely appreciate the skill of the prose, and the book is well written. However, I found it unbearably boring and depressing, with no clear story arc and nothing to keep me gripped or involved. I had no desire to return to it, Not for me, unfortunately!

This novel (piece of auto-fiction?) kept me engaged as the writer revisits his life and that of his parents in a deeply melancholic tone. Now in his 50's divorced and disconnected estranged from his kids, he looks back and regrets not asking his parents more, (about their family, about their feelings). This book is suffused with the dead (parents, and family and friends from the previous generation) and is a fairly gloomy read, one that I never looked forward to picking up but always enjoyed when I did. Spain under Franco colours the novel, and the sense of place (Northern Spain in particular) is strong. I felt it succeeded in being a portrait of Spain as much as of a family, and that was one of the most fascinating aspects for me.

Thank you Canongate for publishing this excellent translation of Ordesa by Manuel Vilas. I doubt I shall read a better book for quite some time and would not be at all surprised to see this on the Booker shortlist in 2021.
What we have in this novel is a stream of consciousness from Vilas. He, aged 53, through a series of vignette-like chapters, reflects on how he feels following the death of his parents and a divorce. His writing is mesmerisingly fluid and I found myself deeply moved as well as desperately sorry for the aching loneliness he so clearly feels.
There are flashes of humour, however. For example, at his father's "lying- out", there is a visitor Manuel vaguely recognises, who spends an inordinately long time gazing into the coffin. On leaving he explains to Manuel that he didn't really know his father that well but, seeing they were the same age, just wanted to see what a man of 74 looked like dead.
Also we share some touchingly beautiful memories. Here's an example. " My mother would dry us off with a huge red towel. When she died, I found that towel in an armoire. It had survived almost fifty years. I was amazed that it still existed- I didn't realise a towel could live so long. I took it with me. It was so well preserved...Was it high quality at work? Or was it a miracle? It was like my family's Shroud of Turin. It's still soft; the fibres are just as fine as they were that very first day my mother used it on my body, the body of a 6 year old boy. We could never shower because of that tiny bathtub and the showerhead clogged by mineral deposits so only a slender trickle of water came out, drops that were tired of being water."
I have to go back to Proust and the smell of madeleines for writing that is so evocative.
This is a book which could be judged as deeply depressing but it is so beautifully written I am sure many readers shall revisit many of its passages and marvel anew at the imagery Vilas has created. Truly exceptional!

A very well written look at life. This is how one man feels about his life and his family. He also tells a bit about Spanish history and present day Spain. It is a thought provoking read.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

I don't think I ever entirely found myself on Ordesa's wavelength, at least not consistently so. It reminded me at various points of the old clichéd scenario where you find yourself next to a stranger in a plane or train compartment, stuck hour upon hour, forced to listen as they keep going on about their childhood, their unusual family, the twists and turns of their life, their regrets etc. in an unceasing one-way flow.

Often one might imagine these monologuers to be quite dull or trying to show off casually about their children's successes and the like but in the case of Manuel Vilas' book - a collection of memory jaunts into the near and distant past - that complaint doesn't hold true.

Vilas' point is that his life is neither unusual or remarkable, and he is determined to give the reader a honest, unvarnished account of it, without sensationalism or (too much) self-pity. It's Human Life in all its messy, flawed, tedious glories and despair, strewn across 157 generally short chapters and linked episodes. He certainly isn't really one of life's half-full characters and there's no happy triumphalism when he looks back on jollier times, let alone the passages where he's keen to really show all the numbing dirt beneath the fingernails of daily life.

However, I don't feel it would be at all fair to describe Ordesa as any kind of 'misery lit'. Instead, Vilas reflects unsparingly upon his and his parents' lives, the smallness of the world he came from in Huesca, Northern Spain, and the utter insignificance - yet paradoxical centrality - of his life and those of others around him in the bigger 'existential picture', at least as experienced by him.

The book is named after a valley in the nearby community of Aragon, and whilst it might be tricky to summarise, for sure it's a mix of things. The style is often literary with sentences veering from the banal to the highbrow, the latter trait unsurprising given his partial career as a university professor. It's downbeat, funny, mundane and wistful, the prose leaping between eras and steeped in what Vilas might term a 'yellow nostalgia' for what both was and never quite came to be.

I believe him when he says he is a now sober ex-alcoholic. However, the other place one might imagine hearing these kind of tales, if not when trapped on plane or train, might well be a dingy bar where the raconteur glumly sits talking to anyone who'll listen about the meaning of all that's happened to them and failing to come up with any answers.

Vilas writes near the end, reflecting on his memories, that “It isn't nostalgia or remorse or guilt. It's something I cannot name. It's inspiration. It's melancholy. Good melancholy” and there's truth for me in that assessment of his work. Ordesa certainly won't appeal to everyone, but might well resonate deeply with those attracted by the sound of the book in the first place. It is, if nothing else, not a typical memoir but instead a rumination upon ordinary existence and how we are shaped both by our environment and our past in ways even more inescapable than is commonly accepted.

With thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchanged for an unbiased review.

"It seemed to me the state of my soul was a blurry memory of something that had occurred in a place in northern Spain called Ordesa, a place full of mountains. And that memory was yellow, the color yellow spreading through the name Ordesa, and behind Ordesa was the figure of my father in the summer of 1969."

Ordesa by Manuel Vilas llegó was voted by critics in the annual El Pais/Babelia poll as the best Spanish language book of 2018 (https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/12/12/album/1544639128_742310.html), a category including translated literature and non-fiction (a translation of Mary Beard's Women & Power was 2nd, and of Rachel Cusk's Kudos 5th, and Eva Baltasar's Permafrost, forthcoming in English from And Other Stories 9th) and in its French translation won the Prix Femina étranger.

It is now available in English translation by Andrea Rosenberg.

This is a deeply personal, at times rather self-obsessed, auto-fictional novel and it opens in a biblical fashion with our first person narrator explaining:

"I’ve been a man of sorrows. I’ve failed to understand life. Conversations with other humans.
...
It pained me to talk to others; I could see the pointlessness of every human conversation that has been and will be. Even as they were happening, I knew they’d be forgotten. The fall before the fall. The futility of conversations—the futility of the speaker, the futility of the spoken-to. Futilities we’ve agreed to so the world can exist.
...
I see death in the breadth and basis of matter; I see the universal weightlessness of all things. I was reading Saint Teresa of Ávila, and she had similar sorts of thoughts."

The novel is written in 2015, "seventy years ago, Germany had just signed its unconditional surrender" and on the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Saint Teresa.

Our narrator is a, relatively unsuccessful, writer, having resigned from his teaching job a few years ago to focus on his writing career. Born in the town of Barbastro, in Huesca province, he is 52, and his reflections in the novel are triggered by events in his life: the change of job, his divorce one year ago, and particularly the death of his parents, his father 10 years earlier, and his mother more recently. His decision to cremate his parents is one that particularly haunts him:

"My father was cremated on December 19, 2005. I regret it now—it may have been a hasty decision."

The format of the novel is distinctive, told in a non-linear style in 157 short vignettes, typically less than two pages long, as the narrator reflects on his life now and his memories of his family, with some idiosyncratic diversions (memories of buying a toy plane, musings on dishwashers) but circling around some common themes. In particular, a trip taken with his father to the Ordesa Valley in (as far as he can reconstruct it) 1969:

"Everything was encapsulated in a name, the name of a place: Ordesa, because my father was genuinely devoted to the Pyrenean valley of Ordesa and because in Ordesa there’s a beautiful and well-known mountain called Monte Perdido, the Lost Mountain. My father didn’t die—he got lost, took off. He became a lost mountain. What he did was disappear. It was a disappearing act. I remember it full well: He wanted to leave. To escape."

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A trip he reconstructs with his own children in 2015:

"I’ve stopped the car and am looking for the exact spot where, forty-six years ago, my father got a flat tire in the SEAT 850 as we were entering the Ordesa Valley. I think how I need to ask my mother where it happened. But I can’t ask her anymore. She’ll settle the question. But she’s dead. It hits me once more. That’s how it always is."

The reference to the SEAT car provides another (non-linear) narrative thread as the changing times are marked by the changing cars - "My father embraced Spain through the SEATs he bought over his entire life. He was loyal to Spain via the SEAT." The author in interviews has referred to the 'cycle' of SEATs of the Spanish emerging middle classes: 600, 850, 124 and 1,430.

And this is the book's main macro-theme - the emergence of the middle classes (memories of the first refrigerator, getting a phone, the first dishwashers) and the retreat of the middle classes post the 2008 financial crisis.

The colour yellow is a recurring motive (and it was great to see the UK publisher following the original cover design) also linked to penury:

"Yellow is a visual state of the soul. Yellow is the color that speaks of the past, of the disappearance of two families, of penury, which is the moral realm that poverty pushes you toward, of the sadness of never seeing your children, of Spain’s fall into Spanish miasmas, of cars, of highways, of memories, of the cities I lived in, of the hotels I slept in—yellow speaks of all of that. Yellow—amarillo—is a resonant word in Spanish. Penury—penuria—is another important word. Penuria and amarillo are two words that dwell together, conjoined."

And this is a very honest and open account, including the narrator (hence the author's) divorce and his alcoholism:

<i>Even though in Spain nobody is open about anything. It would do us a lot of good to write about our families without any fiction creeping in, without storifying. Just recounting what happened, or what we think happened. People conceal their progenitors’ lives. When I meet somebody, I always ask about their parents—about the desire that brought that person into the world.</i>

Overall, a good 4 star read.

I received this as an ARC
Not the most cheerful of books and one I think I should come back to and read, preferably in the original Spanish.
Thoughts on life, family, Spain, capitalism, many things. A beautiful way of expressing himself.
Due to the events of 2020 I'm not sure I got the best from this book which is why I will go back and read it again.
It deserves time and space to be appreciated

Emotional, tense, gripping. It felt very ferrante-like. I love books that explore familial matters and that look at relationships that arent always perfect but have something to say. From the beginning i was hooked as i hadnt read something so different before. I really feel like the yellow theme from the beginning and the cover really solidify this book in my brain as something special.

A monologue of autofiction that somehow captured me though I suspect this is one of those books that you need to be in precisely the right mood for: it's gloomy and introspective, has a kind of aching melancholy of tone. In another mood, I might have been frustrated at another white, middle-class, middle-aged, unfaithful man pontificating pretty much on himself - just be aware, this could go either way! Having picked up the book at the right time, however, I liked the politicised consciousness as this thinks about capitalism, Spain's troubled twentieth-century history, life and death, the bonds and tribulations of family ties. Don't expect a story - this is too post-modern for that. All the same, I found the writing beguiling and was happy to follow the narrator's internal journeys.