Luisa, a Madrid single mother, has written several successful mysteries starring her two detective heroes, psychoanalyst Carmen O’Inns and her partner Isaac Tonnu. Luisa, aged fifty-two and gifted with a “rampant imagination,” has just moved into a new apartment in Madrid with her eleven-year-old daughter Elba, named for the island where Luisa, then aged forty, conceived her while on a “mating trip.” The new apartment will allow Elba to attend the private English High School which Luisa attended as a child. What follows is an unusual variation of metafiction, in which Luisa simultaneously creates her over-the-top novel about the death of a child at a private school, describes the similar death of a child forty years ago when she herself was an eleven-year-old student at her private school, and then relates details about another remarkably similar death of a child at the same private school during the time that her daughter Elba is a student. Three young boys. Three deaths. Three mysteries.
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The Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) and the subsequent dictatorship of General Francisco Franco form the underpinning of this hypnotic novel, which is simultaneously a love story, a story about political and personal aspirations, and a story about writing and the creative process. In a narrative that swirls through time and place, often turning in upon itself and revisiting earlier events from different points of view, life during the tumultuous Civil War unfolds and is carried forward for more than thirty years of Franco’s harsh dictatorship. The style is hypnotic, catching up the reader in the mood and weaving a spell, despite the fact that this unusual novel never moves in a straightforward chronological sequence and so lacks the usual beginning, middle, and end, except as the reader constructs it for him/herself. It is not unusual for some sentences to be one hundred fifty words long and for paragraphs to go on for pages, yet the narrative speeds along on the strength of the spell it weaves and the intensity of the mood it creates. A novel that will appeal to readers willing to succumb to its mood and not worry about the long sentences, lack of direct action, and swirling chronology, A Manuscript of Ashes is an intriguing early novel by an author who is one of Spain’s most honored contemporary authors.
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