The Margellos World Republic of Letters
1 total work
A shattering tale of oppression and resistance during Franco’s dictatorship, by a beloved Spanish novelist
In the arid province of Extremadura in 1960s Spain, life on a country estate carries on as it has for centuries: wealthy landowners live in luxury while workers are forced to endure lives of poverty and humiliation. Amid this exploitation and injustice live Régula, the estate’s gatekeeper, and her husband, Paco, hunting attendant to the contemptuous Señorito Iván. Régula’s brother Azarías toils as a farmhand, but he prefers chasing tawny owls at night, training his pet jackdaw, and caring for his young niece, who is bedridden. When Paco is injured, the nature-loving Azarías is forced to take over as hunting attendant. But after Señorito Iván commits an act of enormous cruelty following an unsuccessful hunt, it is only a matter of time before the simmering tensions between the aristocracy and the workers explode.
A perennial Spanish classic, translated into twelve languages but never before into English, The Holy Innocents invites readers into the heart of rural life under Franco’s dictatorship. In spare and breathless prose, Miguel Delibes offers up a morally urgent tale of human cruelty and alienation, in which liberation is not only necessary but possible.
In the arid province of Extremadura in 1960s Spain, life on a country estate carries on as it has for centuries: wealthy landowners live in luxury while workers are forced to endure lives of poverty and humiliation. Amid this exploitation and injustice live Régula, the estate’s gatekeeper, and her husband, Paco, hunting attendant to the contemptuous Señorito Iván. Régula’s brother Azarías toils as a farmhand, but he prefers chasing tawny owls at night, training his pet jackdaw, and caring for his young niece, who is bedridden. When Paco is injured, the nature-loving Azarías is forced to take over as hunting attendant. But after Señorito Iván commits an act of enormous cruelty following an unsuccessful hunt, it is only a matter of time before the simmering tensions between the aristocracy and the workers explode.
A perennial Spanish classic, translated into twelve languages but never before into English, The Holy Innocents invites readers into the heart of rural life under Franco’s dictatorship. In spare and breathless prose, Miguel Delibes offers up a morally urgent tale of human cruelty and alienation, in which liberation is not only necessary but possible.