The Operation

At the suggestion of a psychiatrist from Vienna called Ingrid, The Operation is recounted from the point of view of five people: Leandro Balseiro, the artist, who fills his mother's house with studies and has an affair with his art teacher, Candela Roma; the artist's mother, Clara Balseiro, who recounts the story of generations of her family, her father's obsession for flowers, and her son's involvement in an environmental protest group; Daniel Sampaio, a concert pianist who lost his memory on being run over by a car in Santiago and who was treated at the hospital by Clara; the psychiatrist herself, Ingrid Meyer; and the art teacher, Candela Roma. The book reads like a Galician version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, except that the family concerned here is not the Buendías, but the Balseiros. It is also a call to environmental activism, to a creative engagement with the world around us and with the language that we use. Teresa Moure's earlier novel, Black Nightshade, winner of the Xerais Prize for Novels, about the relationship between the French philosopher René Descartes, the herbalist Hélène Jans and Queen Christina of Sweden, is also available from Small Stations Press in Philip Krummrich's translation.