Product Description

A poetic tour-de-force that recaptures the last moments in the life of the last inhabitant of a now abandoned Pyrenean village.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #359532 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Synopsis
Ainelle is a village high in the Spanish Pyrenees. Its houses now stand deserted - and have done so for many years - most of them in ruins. Its last surviving inhabitant, an old man at death's door, lingers on, and as the first snows of the year fall and the 'yellow rain' of autumn leaves flutters about him, he recalls the life he lived and the ghosts - once his friends and neighbours - who now frequents his wavering memory and who have taken possession of his solitude. Hailed on first publication, and continuously reprinted, Julio Llamazares' powerful monologue - an elegy to the power of memory - is rightly regarded as a modern classic of Spanish literature. 'Immediately satisfying - a haunting farewell to a way of life' - "Time Out". 'Poignant and exquisite - a sublime and relevant fable' - "Scotland on Sunday". 'A novel that does honour to Spanish literature' - "Corriere della Sera".

About the Author
JULIO LLAMAZARES was born in the now vanished town of Vegamian in 1955. Trained as a lawyer, he moved to Madrid, where he now lives, to devote himself to journalism and writing. He has written novels, including the much-praised Luna de Lobos, as well as prize-winning books of poetry.

Customer Reviews

A modern classic, an elegy for a vanishing way of life.
This powerful and richly atmospheric novel, a classic in Spain for the past fifteen years but only now translated into English, captures the love of an old man for his land and for the village in which he and his ancestors were born. It is also a study of the inexorable effects of time and the pressures it exerts on isolated communities and the human inhabitants who lack direct connection with a wider world. Told from the point of view of the elderly Andres, the last remaining inhabitant of a crumbling village in the Pyrenees, the novel details his physical and emotional deterioration as he observes the parallel collapse of the town, "whole buildings kneeling like cattle," the village itself a mangled and sad "unburied corpse."

As the novel opens, Andres tells us that this is the last day of his life, describing what the men approaching from the nearest town will discover when they come to Ainielle for the first time in ten years. Gradually, Andres reveals the history of the village and of his own family, capturing his own desolation and possible madness. His confrontations with ghosts--of his mother, his three children, and wife Sabina--slowly reveal his life as a family man, along with his disappointments, his sometimes self-defeating behavior, and his never-ending desire to keep alive the village in which his ancestors worked the land. He knows that when he dies, any remaining vestiges of the village and its way of life will disappear from the earth.

Andres's memories and his confrontations with ghosts add color, variety, and a sense of drama to what would otherwise be an interior monologue, showing the conflict between Andres and the forces of change. His preparations for his own death and description of the images the approaching visitors will see on their arrival constitute the quiet climax. The imagery is breath-taking. Realistic and grounded in the stark reality of farm life in a poor, nearly dead village, the nature imagery reveals parallels between the inner forces which have driven Andres to become the last human in Ainielle, and the passage of time and the seasons--deep snow, the rushing water of spring, and the falling poplar leaves, which he sees as "the yellow rain." A haunting memorial to those people who are incapable of accepting the changes of time, the novel forces the reader to consider those values and aspects of the past which are lost from our heritage when the memories and experiences of the elderly are not preserved, when old villages disappear, and when future generations do not care. Mary Whipple

Poetic Rain
Llamazares' 'Yellow rain' is possibly the most beautiful novel I've ever read. It reads like poetry, and the author's detailed descriptions give the reader a fantastic insight into the world of Andres, the protagonist.

This book relates the memories of this old man, left entirely on his own in a dying village in the Spanish Pyrenees. For those of you who have been fortunate enough to visit some of the 'ghost towns' in Aragon, as I have, this novel really will hit home.

With Llamazares' breathtaking imagery, and the sheer beauty of 'Yellow Rain', you won't be able to put it down. I urge you to buy this book, to learn more of the sad, but true, history of the thousands of rural towns in Spain that have disappeared into oblivion.