Between the stifling atmosphere of New York City and the fog-covered mountains of Negueira de Muniz, What Remains follows a young Galician student researching the Franco regime's vast project of forced resettlement. In the 1950s, more than half the inhabitants of the villages in Negueira de Muniz, Galicia, were driven from their land in a brutal experiment to turn 'backward' country people into modern cattle farmers.
Amid the weight of unsettling archival documents, the voices of the displaced, and a sweltering New York summer, the unnamed narrator discovers the mysterious story of a woman who disappeared from her settlement without a trace. As he pieces together her strange fate, he confronts his own temporary status in a foreign land and wonders what it means to call a place home.
Intimate and dreamlike, What Remains is a meditation on the ruins of memory and an urgent exploration of identity, colonialism, and resistance. Inventively blending memoir, fiction, anthropology and travel writing, the novel investigates, with surprising intuition, the traces left in the places we inhabit.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
'This spare, transfixing novel pulled me in immediately. Its understated power, its driving questions about the future of rural communities in a changing world, brought to mind Roy Jacobsen's The Unseen. Jacob Rogers's subtle translation is an ideal match for the sensibility of Lamela's writing in this stunning book.' Idra Novey, author of Take What You Need
'NINGUEN QUEDA reflects on the dark corners of the idea of progress, on the forms of dispossession, and also on contemporary precariousness and homelessness.' Irene Vallejo, author of Papyrus
'With a vocationally hybrid text, between essay and autofiction, Lamela drags us in the footsteps of the colonization plan of A Terra Cha in the 1950s.' Dolores Vilavedra, El Pais
'Immensely impressed & moved by this beautiful debut novel by Brais Lamela.' Garth Greenwell
'What Remains blends personal and historical, archive and memory, forms of habitation and migration. This important novel announces a major new voice in Galician literature.' Daniel Saldana Paris, author of Ramifications
'Lamela's work is an important exercise in our own spaces. At the same time, it demonstrates a way of thinking about the connection between research and literary creation. A way of attending with sensitivity to the history of our empty ruins.' Rodrigo Herrera Alfaia, El Salto
'Why are we not all reading this book? I don't want it to finish.' Maria Sanchez, author of In The Land of Women
'Trust me: read it. In the future you will be able to say: I read Brais before he was famous.' Javier Pena Lopez, author
'This book is about the end of a brutal world ... That Biblical expulsion and exile of the 50s, 60s and 70s sheds light on modern lives of people who have no place to belong to, but who are not exiles either ... This book is about something as important as identity itself, a thing called 'place'. In the digital age, the demand for a place to live will be the banner against nihilism and despair. A place that we love, that nourishes. A place that embraces us.' Suso de Toro, journalist and writer
'The function of history is to trace the events that happened before us, but only literature is capable of embodying them and giving them breath. And NINGUEN QUEDA achieves this goal.' Cesar Lorenzo Gil
Sprache
Verlagsort
Maße
Höhe: 198 mm
Breite: 129 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-917653-00-8 (9781917653008)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Brais Lamela is a writer in Galician and PhD candidate at Yale University. What Remains (published in Galician in 2022 as Ninguen Queda) is his first novel. It won the 2022 Spanish National Critics Award in Fiction and the 2023 RNE Ojo Critico Prize for the best novel by an author under forty in Spain. Lamela lives in New York City.
