A boyhood in Spain
Euan Cameron
SPEAK SUNLIGHT by Alan Jolis Hamish Hamilton, f15.00, pp.224 We should be grateful for the survival of curiosities such as this gentle little memoir. Its publication, in Britain at least, goes against all the current wisdom of the trade: the author is not a celebrity; his 'acclaimed' novel, mentioned on the jacket, was only published in America; the settings are Galicia and Navarre, rather than Provence or Tuscany. An optimistic sales estimate would scarcely exceed 500 copies these days. All the more reason therefore for a reviewer to want to be able to applaud Hamish Hamilton for publishing such an uncommercial book.
From the haven of middle age, Alan Jolis, son of a European father and an American mother, looks back on his childhood, and in particular on the two key influences in his sentimental education: the Spanish servants Maruja and Manolo, a Galician peasant and her Basque husband, who worked as cook and butler at his wealthy parents' home in Paris. As his Nabokovian title suggests, the author's intention is to convey mood and impres- sion, rather than substance. 'This is my truth, as distilled as I can make it', he explains in his Anti-Foreword'.
He proceeds to evoke the sounds and smells of summer holidays spent in Fran- co's Spain with his larger than life parental substitutes. Fat Maruja weeps with emotion as their train crosses the frontier at Irvin. She feeds her boy on churros and her voice becomes 'thirty per cent louder, more self-assured' once she is back in her beloved homeland, whereas Manolo, tall and dignified (he serves at table 'as if he were the Prince of the Long Countenance'), takes the child around Pamplona, filling his mind with dis- turbing stories about attempted copulation with animals and how he once bit off Maruja's nipples.
Jolis also describes being taken on a tour of Madrid's tapas bars with his Uncle Joaquin, running illegally (he is under age) with the bulls at the San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona, where he watches the wretchedly maligned matador, El Cor- dobes, perform to the mockery of the crowds, as well as idyllic summers spent in Galicia, falling in love with his various cousins.
The author's achievement is to allow the reader to glimpse these memories from the perspective of a young boy's point of view, but his over-lush, self-consciously sensuous prose style will, I suspect, be indigestible for British sensibilities, particularly since it is scattered with ludicrously improbable American slang. My image of these proud Spaniards was shattered by having expres- sions such as 'pulling on your weener"an evening of goofing off, and 'selling her ass' put in their mouths. And, incidentally, someone ought to point out that the river Ebro does not flow through Madrid.
Jolis is most effective when, as a student in new York some years later, he is told of Maruja's death and relives in his imagina- tion her last journey home to Galicia. Unfortunately, this tender and moving pas- sage is immediately followed by an excruci- ating one in which the author, by now a man of 32, interrogates Manolo, who is in his sixties and living in Paris with another man: `Manolo, are you, you know . . . sort of, well, mariquita?' and then, 'What is it like? I mean sex with your lover?' So touchingly direct, these americans.
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