Rafael Chirbes
Rafael Chirbes (1949-2015) wrote nine novels and received the National Prize for Literature and the Critics Prize for On the Edge. ABC named him “the best writer of the twenty-first century in Spain.”
Cremation
by Rafael Chirbes
Translated by Valerie Miles
The booming post-Franco years have left everything up for grabs along a stretch of the Mediterranean coastline of Spain: real-estate developers scramble to transform the once pastoral landscape into resorts, nightclubs, and beachfront properties with lavish pools. Cremation opens with the death of Matías, a paterfamilias who had rejected all of these changes and whose passing sets off a chain reaction, uncovering guilts and resentments that had been buried for years and leading those closest to him to question the paths they’ve chosen.
In a rich mosaic narrative, filled with a hypnotic chorus of voices, Cremation explores the coked-up champagne fizz of luxurious parties and underworlds of political corruption, prostitution, and ruthless financial speculation. The novel follows the melancholy ouroboros of capitalist greed that led to the financial crash and captures something essential about our values, our choices, and our all-too-human mistakes. Like William Faulkner or Francis Bacon, Chirbes stares clear-eyed into the abyss and portrays us as we really are.
On the Edge
On the Edge opens in a swamp on the outskirts of Olba, Spain, a town wracked by despair after the economic bubble bursts. Stuck in this corrupt, defeated town is Esteban—his small factory bankrupt and his investments stolen by a “friend.” Much of the novel unfolds in Esteban’s raw and tormented monologues. But other voices resound from the wreckage—soloists stepping forth from the choir with their own terse, hypnotic rants about debt, prostitution, and ruin. However, now and again, with his own majestic authorial voice, Chirbes interrupts the chorus, allowing a lyrical note to usher in profound if uncertain hopes. On the Edge, as Valerie Miles writes in her afterword, “is masterful, a centrifugal novel with sentences like sticky tentacles that clutch onto readers and suck them into a swirling, tempestuous, pulsating center.”
A densely powerful writer—Chirbes is bravely faithful to the shape that true internal discourse takes."
Easily one of the year’s finest and most important works, Chirbes’s On the Edge stands out as a marvel of what fiction is capable of doing (and, oh, that inescapable cover!).
Hot to the touch–a slow roast.
— Cleaver Magazine
Rafael Chirbes is a master of the kind of of Spanish literature that shines most brightly in lyrical descriptive passages and powerful metaphors. When this book finally releases its grip, you may find your lapels sullied by grubby fingerprints you are in no rush to scrub out.
— Mara Faye Lethem, The New York Times
The novel’s bleak or seamy settings are morbidly inviting, and its narrator’s sour and cynical discourses have a mesmerising, incantatory power. Even Chirbes’s two main unsavoury themes – death and money – are explored in fascinating ways.
— Malcolm Forbes, The National
On the Edge, Chirbes’s masterpiece, arrives as a message in a bottle among all the cans, rusting appliances, and tangled tackle. The fumes of the lagoon mix with the lingering sulfur of the Atocha railway-station bombing; the Spanish economy has all but collapsed. Who, or what, is to blame? Chirbes’s novel accuses everyone.
— Joshua Cohen, Harper's
The year’s best early discovery. Chirbes trumps Houellebecq with this novel of monologues, of welter and ruin in a fallen Europe.
— Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire
Literature, as Adorno once said, is a clock that keeps ticking. But it is also the best tool for understanding the world when reality is torn to shreds. Both rules are strictly complied with by great authors. And Rafael Chirbes is one.
— El Mundo
On The Edge is a masterful, a centrifugal novel with sentences like sticky tentacles that clutch onto readers and suck them into a swirling, tempestuous, pulsating center.
— Valerie Miles
Utterly convincing in its psychological details, but also memorable for the beauty of its writing and rhythms.
— Colm Tóibín
This is the great novel of the crisis. The corrosive voice of Rafael Chirbes in On the Edge paints a portrait of a universe of unemployment and disappointment— the long hangover that follows the party of corruption.
— El Pais
One of the greatest European authors of our time.
— Le Monde
One of the most remarkable authors on the Spanish scene.
— The Guardian
The best writer of the twenty-first century in Spain.
— ABC
Chirbes, one of Spain’s premier writers, is at his best when fully immersed, as he is in this novel. If Proust and an Old Testament prophet had collaborated to write about Spain’s recession, it might have been something like the writing here—agonized, dense, full of rage, and difficult to forget.
— Publishers Weekly
A moving, densely detailed portrait of people without hope.
— Kirkus Reviews
On the Edge, Chirbes’s masterpiece, arrives as a message in a bottle among all the cans, rusting appliances, and tangled tackle. The fumes of the lagoon mix with the lingering sulfur of the Atocha railway-station bombing; the Spanish economy has all but collapsed. Who, or what, is to blame? Chirbes’s novel accuses everyone.
— Joshua Cohen, Harper's
