A Son of the Rock

Arcaia Books, 2014, 742 p, plus 9 p Dramatis Personae. Translated from the Catalan, Jo Confesso, (Raval Edicions SLU, Proa, 2011,) by Mara Faye Lethem.

How to describe a book that is so unlike anything else I have read yet at the same time has echoes of so much I have? Simultaneously a history, a biography, a love story and a tale of friendship; with moments of joy, moments of sadness, moments of betrayal, moments of horror. Twisting, shifting and refusing categorisation, it contains multitudes. Humanity in all its guises, many of them unappealing.

Confessions is a long, complex, but nevertheless still easy to read, novel, ostensibly the life story of Barcelona native Adrià Ardèvol, whose misfortune it was – as he tells us in the novel’s first sentence – to be born into the wrong family. He describes it as an unforgivable mistake. This is not quite a paraphrase of Tolstoy’s aphorism about families but it does prepare us for the frosty nature of his relationships with his parents, neither of whom he thinks ever loved him, or each other. Indeed, he wonders why they bothered to get married in the first place.

Possibly as a result of this coldness the young Adrià personifies his toys, Sheriff Carson of Rockland and the Valiant Arapaho Chief, Black Eagle, who act as a sounding board for his thoughts and conscience since they talk back to him – sometimes even initiating the conversation. This discourse diminishes through time but never entirely disappears.

Adrià’s father was a dealer in manuscripts, incunabula, antiquities, curios etc (given the unprincipled nature of his transactions I hesitate to call them objects of virtu – but of course the objects themselves would be blameless) and kept a shop in Barcelona. One of his gifts to Adrià was a Storioni violin, made in Cremona in 1674, whose sound is better than a Stradivarius. The novel is also the story of that violin, named Vial, of its creator and its ownership.

The narrative is frequently addressed to “you”, and at first this “you” might be assumed to be the reader but then it is found to be Sara, the love of Adrià’s life, to whom he is relating his life story – and his sins. The text contains repeated instances where the word confiteor is repeated as a single sentence.

That love is Sara Voltes-Epstein, an illustrator of artistic talent, who is a Jew and incurs the suspicions of Adrià’s mother, who think she is after the Ardèvol family’s money and hence scuppers any chance of Adrià marrying her. Here the familiar arc of boy meets girl boy loses girl takes shape and indeed the two do get together later – years later – but that strand, though the central tragedy of Adrià’s life, is only a small part of this voluminous book, one of whose historical scenes implicitly draws parallels between the mediæval treatment of Jews and its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. That Sara is Jewish is central to Adrià’s story and his ultimate anguish.

The narrative is not straightforward, slipping between first and third person (I and he/Adrià) seemingly at random, conversations switch from direct to reported speech then back again with no punctuational signals, descriptions within them of past events are presented as a historical account of what those speakers would have said (or did say.) The setting can change years, decades – or centuries – within a single paragraph or even sentence. Often someone’s speech is suddenly cut off midline by an interruption. We witness the same scene from several different viewpoints sometimes hundreds of pages apart. Yet this all seems organic, all natural. Everything flows.

It is the violin which ties the whole together, acquired by Adrià’s father for a knock-down price from a former SS officer who took it from its rightful owner inside the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, given to Adrià to play – but he has no desire to have a career as a violinist. In contrast his friend Bernat does do so but in turn wants to write stories which Adrià tells him have uninspiring prose and he should stick to the violin. All interleaved with the unfolding of Adrià’s life, we see scenes of the violin’s construction from a cache of uniquely treated wood and its subsequent passing down through the generations, the shutdown of the monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal in the 15^th century, the significance of the number 615428, the resonance of the Urgell painting in Adrià’s childhood home of the Sant Maria de Gerri monastery receiving the light of the sun setting behind Trespui and much, much more. Occasional, highly intermittent, sections are rendered in italics, apparently written by Bernat which in the end cast an utterly different light on what we have been reading before.

This might all seem too elaborate a construction to balance but Cabré is entirely in control of what he is doing and is not afraid to show it. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad” is a straight quotation from Gabriel García Márquez though Adrià does not actually face a firing squad – except metaphorically. The nearest literary comparison to the effect Cabré creates that I can think of is Kurt Vonnegut, but Vonnegut is more off-beat, more fanciful. Confessions deals entirely in the human sphere. “Evil existed before the war and doesn’t depend on any entelechy, but rather on people.”

There is a comment on the changing of attitudes over time when a lecturer says, “‘In the eighteenth century, if you weren’t wearing a wig, makeup, stockings and high heels, they wouldn’t let you into the salons. Today, a man wearing makeup, a wig, stockings and heels would be locked up in prison without any questions being asked.’” This was in Franco’s time in Spain, which Adrià – and Cabré – experienced. That dictatorship is only lightly touched on in the text but adds an undertone of colour.

Adrià tells Sara through his memoire, “you will continue living in these lines every time someone reads these pages,” but it is his overall story of greed and hate, but also friendship and love, the enduring constants of human interactions, that will linger.

Confessions is a tour-de-force.

Pedant’s corner:- On the inside cover blurb “reaches a crescendo” (reaches a climax.) Otherwise; “which much hve been immense” (which must have been,) Mrs Canyameres’ (Canyameres’s.) “Even thought I was very young” (Even though,) “wile away my time” (while away,) “the only thing that kept him in Cremona were the attentions of the dark, passionate Carina” (the only thing … was the attentions,) “having caught me in fragranti” (in flagrante,) “but the silent was thick” (silence,) “off of” (x 2, no ‘of’, just ‘off’,) “inside of me” (no ‘of’, just ‘inside me’.) Obersturbahnführer (Obersturmbahnführer,) Fèlix Morlin (elsewhere always Félix Morlin,)  “inside out fatherland” (our fatherland.) “‘Who knows.’” (Who knows?) Planas (Plensa?) “worse for the wear” (no ‘the’, just ‘worse for wear’,) “you mouth dropped open” (your mouth,) the perfect place to sooth the torments” (to soothe; to sooth would be a different thing entirely,) “the strict silence that accompany the twenty four hours” (accompanies,) Complin (Compline,) insuring (ensuring,) Germany (German,) “his licence exam” (his driving test.) Strumbahnführer (x 4, Sturmbahnführer?) “‘Where’d you get that come from?’” (‘Where’d you get that from?’ Or ‘Where’d that come from?’,) “as if she had shook off a few years” (shaken off.) “Kamenek, with a smile, slide the microphone towards” (slid the microphone,) “to stab he who pauses” (to stab him who,) forrage (forage,) “for a several years” (no ‘a’,) “to be hear it for myself” (no ‘be’,) consierge (concierge,) an extraneous quotation mark. “I was wracked by my bad conscience” (I was racked by.)