Big Ol' Book of Woes--but Good!

La reina descalza by Ildefonso Falcones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book, like all of the author's books, is large in scope, covering many years and encompassing the fortunes of many people. He chooses to tell the history of his native Spain, but not in a general way. Falcones focuses on marginalized groups, revealing something of their experience in a Spain that never wanted them. Other books deal with Spain's treatment of its Jewish population (La Catedral del Mar) and its Moors (La Mano de Fatima), especially the injustice and unfairness and cruelty shown to these groups. This book does the same for Spain's gitanos, (gypsies, though better rendered Romani) and it's just as brutal and hard to take.

This is a well-written novel, and it's entertaining as well as instructive, but it's not often fun. (That's his style, actually.) The author makes you care about Milagros, a beautiful young gitana, as well as Caridad, a recently freed slave, and people connected to them, and then puts them through all the horrors that their population endured in this time so that the reader can, I suppose, feel their pain. I did, anyway. Characters are separated from one another, jailed for no reason, prevented from earning a living, coerced into accepting Christianity, beaten, killed, raped, punished, and humiliated in every possible way, with only a few moments here and there of kindness and acceptance and peace. It's a taxing story, though one is forced to recall that the events are essentially true, emerging from the history of intolerance in Spain. If they had to survive it, a reader should be able to at least read about it, right?

That's how I see it, anyway.

So... not too fun, but still entertaining, which is a different thing. It's also more of a struggle for me since Spanish is my second language, and that affects how I perceive the joys of reading it. Nevertheless, I feel like it's worth the effort. The text is harder, and my progress slower, than if I read it in English, and I must confess that I spread the reading out over too much time (months, actually), but I'd rather read it haltingly in the original than fluently in translation. Better readers will be able to avoid this difficulty. :) And they may report having more fun than I did.

In terms of craft, I feel like the author wanders too much, tries to include too much, to the point that every character seems to have lived two or three lives. But that seems to be an expectation of the genre. Many readers, I think, want to have that kind of meandering middle with lots of pages to get lost in. I found it less charming, but his other novels do the same thing, with endless ups and downs (and downs) for his characters, so I was not surprised by it. Still, that rather gratuitous punishing of all the main characters through the middle section is why I rank it (just for me) as good at 4 stars, not 5-star-amazing.

Perhaps the best part of the novel is el Galeote, Milagros's grandfather. He's a hard man, uncompromising and foolhardy, but loyal and dogged in his efforts to protect his family. In some ways, he's the real hero of the novel. Other characters get to be the hero here and there, but he carries it the most. And his relationship with Caridad, the freed slave, is both realistic and touching.

I recommend this novel for those are interested in Spanish history and can bear the cruelty heaped on its main characters. You should find a lot to entertain and instruct. You may even find some rays of hope for humanity in places.

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