DNF

I got 24% into this one and decided to DNF.
The language and sexual content just wasn't something I felt comfortable reading, so I ultimately decided to stop reading.

During the time of my youth, there were times when I felt like I want to escape my hometown just to find out what the other side of the horizon looks like. Unlike me, Suiza chooses to follow her desire to see the sea even at the cost of losing important things. She hitchhiked and got stranded in Galicia, far from her comfortable home in France. It’s in Galicia that she was mistaken as a Swiss, taken as a waitress at Álvaro’s bar, and being labelled as stupid by the villagers due to the fact that she couldn’t speak Spanish. It was at this time that Tomás came to her rescue, kidnapping her in front of everyone at the bar.

Tomás’s life is full of loneliness. He never felt any real love throughout his life. His father committed suicide as soon as he reached adulthood, telling him in his suicide note that he wishes to follow Tomás’s mother footsteps in heaven and left him with a farm to tend. He felt he couldn’t love his first wife, Rosetta, who ended up dying young after less than 5 years of marriage due to breast cancer. On top of that, he is suddenly diagnosed with lung cancer at the height of his loneliness. It was at this time that he encountered Suiza during one of his frequent visits to Álvaro’s bar when he could not hide the desire aroused in him seeing her up close.

What follows is a tragic yet sweet love story in unlikely circumstances to happen in real life. Bénédicte Belpois tells the story from two points of view, both Tomás and Suiza get their shares of voice to recount their stories. Tomás’s thoughts are described using bestial elements with how he desires to take Suiza into his bed and screw her, whereas Suiza’s mind is depicted as selfless with no material wants. The scenes that happen in between of their relationship are intense with frequent depictions of their lovemakings, about which I am sure not everyone would be able to digest it properly.

However, Suiza ends up curing the hatred and contempt that Tomás had towards life. It’s the story of healing, how one person could heal another’s wounds. The meeting between Tomás and Suiza could simply be discerned as serendipity, an unlikely thing to happen, yet it still happens. By living together, they soon learned how to be tender towards each other. Other people around Tomás, the old farmer helper Ramón and the former wetnurse Agustina told him how his behaviours and demeanours changed after the arrival of Suiza in his life.

I don’t know if I like or hate this book. The story is really simple, yet the prose is beautiful, and I’ll have to admit that the translation of Alison Anderson is rich in words. It kinda reminds me of the simplicity of daily life in old age, with a depiction of Tomás and Suiza as Adam and Eve in a communal village in Galicia where everyone knows everyone else. Bénédicte Belpois as a Frenchwoman really does a great job in depicting the minds of men and the daily life in Galicia, as she wrote this story during a long stay in Galicia. Perhaps this is the kind of story that could only be produced through the encounter with Others.

A beautifully written and translated book BUT extremely disturbing misogynist and violent main character who finds some sort of redemption for his life through terminal illness and falling in love with the seemingly imbecilic and homeless woman Suiza whom he drags away from the local barman, rapes and deposits in his own house. Thereafter his and her lives are transformed for the better? A desperate ending.

I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn’t connect with the characters or writing style. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good book, of course—everyone has different tastes so if the description appeals to you, give it a go.

Suiza is translated from the French by Alison Anderson from Bénédicte Belpois’s 2019 novel of the same name

It opens, ominously:

"People around here are bound to say anything they want about me, given what happened. Anything. That it was in my genes, the violence and boredom, that I really did take after my father and it was sure to happen anyway."

Our narrator, Tomás, is almost 40, a well-off farmer in an otherwise impoverished small Galician village, but taciturn and lonely, his parents both dead and his wife having died 16 years previously, his only two real companions his farmhand Ramón and his former wetnurse, Agustina. As the story he tells opens he has just received a diagnosis of advanced lung cancer.

"Generations under the yoke of poverty, and a financial crisis that had broadsided us added another layer of difficulty. The hardship had dug in, we were like stones surprised by a winter frost. The most striking thing was that since we were used to doing without, and couldn’t deprive ourselves any more than we already had, we’d become sparing even in our feelings and our relations with others. We didn’t say much, just what was essential, indispensable. We kept to a bare minimum. We didn’t know how to deal with gentleness. Our values had not changed—friendship, honor, love, respect—but we only expressed them in deeds, and they too were reduced to an extreme. Words had disappeared. Happiness was fleeting, almost a miracle, and often culinary. A good glass of wine, a good plate of meat, a dark bread that stuck to your guts were more satisfying than any compliment. Poverty hadn’t made us mean, but it left us close-fisted when it came to feelings. I should have been more talkative, since I was richer, but alas, I was even more rough around the edges than the others, because I had constructed myself with this lack of love, and no one had been able, or had had the time, to teach me otherwise.
...
Sixteen years since Rosetta died. Sixteen years of solitude. That must be why I was on a short fuse, even with my late-stage cancer. I would turn forty at Christmas, I was still in the prime of life, in spite of my illness. I should have bought myself another wife, another Rosetta . . . Even if old Ramón still called me kid, or son, or boy, time had had its way with me like with everyone. I felt old, worn out, sick, and bitter. And I had been talking to myself for ages."

On his daily visit to the local bar, where he drinks expensive wine only he can afford, he discovers there is a new member of staff, a woman referred to as “Suiza” who was discovered sleeping rough in the chicken sheds.

“Where’s she from?”
“Switzerland, apparently. That explains the name. In fact, we don’t even know her name. Some Swiss name, probably, something not from around here. But everyone calls her Suiza.”

In fact Suiza, whose real name is Sylviane, is from France, a fact the reader discovers in some slightly incongruous sections told from her perspective. Institutionalised as a girl, she hitchhikes to Spain simply, and naively, in search of the sea and piece of evocative guitar music.

Suiza is unable to communicate verbally with the villagers, in part due to language and in part her own lack of education.

“A French-Spanish dictionary.”
“Why French? She’s Swiss isn’t she? Why not Swiss-Spanish?”
“The Swiss speak French, Agustina, there’s no such thing as Swiss. They can speak German, too, or even Italian.”
“They don’t have their own language, they have to go stealing from others? The buggers! Then they come and lecture us with their money and their banks, and they don’t even have what it takes to talk to each other . . . What a bunch of savages, that’s for sure!”
“They do have their own language, Romansh, but not many Swiss people speak it, to be honest.”
“Then it’s not really a language, is it. Savages, I tell you.”

But her body drives the men of the village wild, the bar owner making it clear that servicing him is part of her duties:

"I don’t know what it is about her that drives us all half crazy. I can see she’s not like other women, that she gives off this impression of being a little bit stupid and it’s not just because of the language barrier. But I don’t think she is stupid, not really, it’s something else. It’s as if she’d been arrested, prevented from growing up."

On his return visit to the bar, and filled with animal lust, Tomás literally drags Suiza out of the bar, forces himself upon her in the street, then takes her home as his trophy.

What follows is a rather odd “love” story, as Tomás, with his life nearing an end, comes to appreciate better his relationship with Ramón and Agustina, and, very gradually, moves from lust to a form of love for Suiza and to treating her like a person rather than a sex doll he owns. And throughout the sense of dread from the ominous opening of the story hangs over the reader.

Mixed feelings on this one. It’s well written with a very earthy feel, but it’s hard not to feel this is a story of a crime rather than a love affair, and the inclusion of Suiza's perspective didn't really work for me, too infrequent and brief to really enable the reader to understand her.