Interesting that since I'm helping Mariann with interviews on the Civil War, the Transition and the so-called 'Pacto de Olvido', (especially the cultural one proposed by Semprun and Paz), I've had my eyes open for novels exploring those periods.

Yet I wonder whether there are even fewer novels that take as their terrain the cultural desert of Franco's regime. La Sombra del Viento spans from 1945 to 55, under the grey reality of the dictatorship. They truly seem to be 'dias de ceniza', and Barcelona is a city continually damped down by clouds and rain. Ruiz Zafón's writing is superb. His prose is intensely rich yet easily readable.

His characters bear the physical or psychological scars of the Civil War, or else are suspiciously immune - such as Barceló: even while Clara's father dies in the dungeons on Montjuic, his fortune survives the turmoils of war and conquest intact. Others are not so lucky, like the pathetic Fermín.

Anyway, these are first impressions. I'm only a quarter of the way through the book. To be continued...

I've just started reading The Grandiflora Tree by Shonagh Koea. I picked it off Mum's bookshelf when last back in NZ and became absolutely absorbed for a few hours before family-visiting duties hooked their talons back in and pulled me away struggling. Having reopened it, I'm being charmed as strongly as I was then.

It surprises me that Koea isn't better known internationally. She immerses you in her character in a way that brings to mind Coetzee's singleminded focus on his world (eg Age of Iron). In the novel I'm working on at the moment, I'm doing something similar (cheeky to make the comparison, I know) with that intense gaze directed at one individual's reality - in my case it's somebody at the other end of life, just emerging from adolescence.

To be continued...

Yes, a very satisfying book. An absorbing read. A closely detailed look at the grieving process - as well as a post-mortuary journey of discovering who the narrator's partner really was. If I have any criticism it was that the voices of the well (or not) wishers were all a little uniform and they went on a bit too long - I would have liked a greater sense of a range of the people surrounding her. As it was, it felt like (and the author probably intended it so) these voices were a single amorphous mass. The husband's diary was a fun read - incredible to think there might have been enough desirable females in the entire British Isles to satisfy him!

Regarding the Koetzee comparison: although Koea does communicate well on the universal theme of death and grieving, Koetzee's prose somehow lifts you uniquely, on a breeze stinking of noble humanity, which very few authors can manage. His subject matter too - the changes occurring in South Africa - are a powerful prop with which to explore the human state.

This thought occurred to me while I was reading E.S.Dallas's "The Gay Science" for my uni course (19th C. lit.), based on his arguments:

"The object of science, we say, is knowledge - a perfect grasp of all the facts which lie within the sphere of consciousness. The object of art is pleasure - a sensible possession or enjoyment of the world beyond consciousness. We do not know that world, yet we feel it - feel it chiefly in pleasure, but sometimes in pain, which is the shadow of pleasure."

I would agree to a certain extent, but I think art has a more central role in human evolution than mere pleasure or relaxation. Art is the practising of intuition -the systematic mapping of the unknown- that allows us to make those imaginative leaps to which science owes its advances.

Art cannot advance without science, without technique, without those known processes to support it; and science cannot advance without the imagination that art fuels.