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Loading... Above the Rain: A Novel (edition 2021)by Víctor del Árbol (Author)
Work InformationAbove the Rain: A Novel by Víctor del Árbol
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In the latest novel from a master of European crime fiction, past, present, and future collide on a breathtaking journey from 1950s Morocco to modern-day Spain and Sweden. Miguel and Helena meet at a nursing home in Tarifa, at an age when they believe they have lived it all already. Distanced from their children, they feel they are no longer needed. The sudden suicide of one of the other residents opens their eyes. They dont want to spend their last days longing for supposedly better times, so together they decide to undertake the journey of their lives and confront the darkness in their pasts. Meanwhile, in the distant Swedish city of Malm, the young Yasmina, a child of Moroccan immigrants who dreams of being a singer, lives trapped between her authoritarian grandfather and her contemptuous mother, who is ashamed of Yasmina because she works for a Swede with a murky reputation. And shes having a secret affair with the Deputy Commissioner of the Swedish police, an older, influential man. As Yasmina is drawn deeper into Malms criminal underworld and Miguel and Helena approach the end of their feverish road trip, Vctor del rbol masterfully reconstructs the history of violence that links their seemingly disparate lives. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)863.7Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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One, Helena, is introduced in the opening chapters as a child living in Morocco in 1955. Her father has abandoned her and her English mother who, distraught, tries to drown herself and Helena in the sea. Flash forward to 2014, where she and the uptight former accountant Miguel, dealing with the onset of dementia, live in a posh but deadening senior residence.
Helena and Miguel could not be more different, yet their differences draw them together. In time they learn about their families. Both have estranged children, both had unhappy marriages and affairs that didn’t help them escape, and both had tortured relationships with absent fathers and mentally ill mothers.
Interspersed with their stories, there are scenes in Malmo, Sweden, where a beautiful young girl, Yasmina, is being used by a drug kingpin to seduce a corrupt police official. Her mother was similarly trapped in prostitution and violence; we eventually learn that her grandfather, Abdul, is a link that connects these threads to Helena’s past.
ABOVE THE RAIN is skillfully layered and masterfully plotted. Excellently translated by Lisa Dillman, its characters and the connections between them across time and space are revealed over the course of a lusciously-rendered panorama.
If the weft of the tapestry is characters discovering themselves and reflecting on troubled relationships with their past and their children, the warp is violence. Del Árbol explores the societal violence that punishes forbidden love, intimate partner violence that turns Miquel’s pregnant daughter’s life upside down, the violence of criminal enterprises and criminal law enforcement officers that use women as pawns, and the violence of the Spanish Civil War that consumed Miguel’s Republican father, a prisoner who died alongside countless others constructing a now-crumbling monument to fascism.
Despite the constant presence of violence lurking around the corner, ABOVE THE RAIN is above all a tender and insightful story of two people uncovering their pasts and finding meaning and purpose in the waning days of their lives.
Reposted from Reviewing the Evidence.