From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
Devastating, desolate, and disquieting, Rafael Chirbes's On the Edge ought to rank as one of the decade's finest novels. Set in late 2010, following the economic crisis that ravaged the Spanish economy (as well as many others around the world), On the Edge offers an unflinching glimpse of a nation despoiled and reeling. An unemployment rate of 20 percent (and rising), poverty, prostitution, xenophoboia, Islamophobia, immigration fears, human trafficking, violence, corruption, and environmental decay are the real-life milieu upon which Chirbes situates his unforgiving tale. Free from didacticism or a moralizing tone, Chirbes stands amidst the debris and destruction, and, with an unflinching gaze, attests to and confirms the harrowing aftermath wrought in the wake of international recession and crises. A remarkable portrait of one man's struggle to make sense of an encompassing personal, economic, and social decay, On the Edge breathes life into an otherwise asphyxiating scene. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
opens with the discovery of a rotting corpse in the marshes on the outskirts of Olba, Spain--a town wracked by despair after the burst of the economic bubble, and a microcosm of a world of defeat, debt, and corruption. Stuck in this town is Esteban--his small factory bankrupt, his investments stolen by a "friend," and his unloved father, a mute invalid, entirely his personal burden. 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 — and their words, sharp as knives, crowd their terse, hypnotic monologues of ruin, prostitution, and loss.
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"This is the great novel of the crisis. The corrosive voice of Rafael Chirbes paints a portrait of a universe of unemployment and disappointment--the long hangover that follows the party of corruption." El País
Review
"Rafael Chirbes is one of the greatest European authors of our time." Le Monde
Review
"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 of them." El Mundo
About the Author
The author of nine novels and the winner of the National Prize for Literature and the Critics Prize for On the Edge, Rafael Chirbes (born in Valencia in 1949) is "the best writer of the twenty-first century in Spain" (ABC). Margaret Jull Costa, the award-winning translator from Spanish and Portuguese, was made an Office of the Order of the British Empire in 2014.