We’re born, we grow, we accumulate what we can of the world – knowledge, skills, pleasures, food, time, money, affection, disaffection – and then depart. It’s a system. But when it means the disappearance of people you love, it can seem an awfully wasteful one. In his autobiographical novel Ordesa, the Spanish writer Manuel Vilas balks at letting his dead parents go. Death is old-fashioned, he declares.
And so begins an intentionally faltering and onanistic research project, as the narrator meanders through the foggy past in an attempt to bring his parents back into focus. The process of dredging up nuggets of personality and experience from the mud fascinates him – perhaps a little too much. Near the end, he declares he’s falling in love with his own life. The reader is left feeling a bit of a gooseberry.
This is one lost guy. The book is admirably plotless, an expression in written form of the narrator’s own perplexity. He records his every filial stirring, and much else besides that may or may not be relevant to the main theme. It becomes a way of looking honestly at what mourning really feels like – some of his observations on grief, along with the self-hatred and guilt that can follow a death, will strike a chord with anyone who has experienced a similar rupture.
Nothing much happens. It is life unsculpted, and what we learn of the narrator himself is largely accidental. A divorced ex-teacher and author, he has a difficult history with alcohol and two teenage sons he doesn’t see much. He can suddenly erupt with hatred for this or that. He’s got it in for insects, which he sees as “just dirt with tiny wings”. One day he hoovers up an ant invasion: “I felt like an honest-to-God mass murderer.”
Sparse themes are tentatively established, including the sun, the colour yellow, the mother, the father, their ghosts, drinking, writing and monogamy’s failings. The narrator also reluctantly unearths some childhood sexual abuse. But the most emaciated thread is Ordesa itself. It’s quite a disappointment to reach the end without gleaning anything much about this valley in the Pyrenees; the memory of it seems to act as a kind of security blanket for the narrator, and is unlikely to lure tourists to the area. (Just as well.)
Poverty, past and present, is unrelenting. The narrator derives little comfort from his cheap flat. His furniture is salvaged from skips, and his clothes are musty. “Do you know what it’s like to go around smelling like fermented armoire all damn day?” He broods. Outlandish asides and Bernhardian exaggerations enliven the dirge. Appropriately, given his central subject, the irony is laid on thick on the subject of death: “It makes house calls … It’s a good service they offer.” And he’s biting about being Spanish: “The Spaniard wants all Spaniards to die so he can possess the Iberian Peninsula alone.”
Aided by Andrea Rosenberg’s nimble translation, the novel insouciantly offers a barrage of transitory, self-contradictory and argumentative assertions. Sentiment and pseudo-sagacious maxims are swiftly undercut by quips. Though he misses his parents, the narrator retains an acid view of family life. “We all blamed one another. My father blamed my mother. My mother blamed me. I blamed my father. My father blamed me.” He even questions his date of birth: “I could be the victim of a mistake; my mother had a terrible memory.”
Perhaps hoping to shock his initial Spanish audience (the book sold well in Spain), Vilas doubts the effectiveness of the Holy Spirit as a “sperm donor” – don’t we all? – and wonders if Saint Teresa’s handwriting might have improved if she’d used a ballpoint pen. His own writing suffers from indecision: he often makes several stabs at a sentence and then includes each try. This may serve the unspoken aim of authenticity, but it sure slows things down.
He can be funny. The narrator attends a grand literary banquet involving Spanish royalty. “I’m afraid of the king – I can’t help it.” But some jokes sag. His brother has pre-knotted his tie for him for the occasion, and this “fake necktie”, “humiliated necktie”, “doomed tie”, “depressed tie” keeps cropping up. Enough with the tie already! He’s better on the royal couple: “They are husband and wife, and so I feel some compassion for them. It’s normal to feel compassion for married couples, especially as their years of conjugal bondage pile up.”
Meanwhile, he continues the parental resuscitation. His mother “lived her life surrounded by olive oil” – that, and bingo, nail polish and Julio Iglesias. “In power” for 50 years, “longer than Francisco Franco”, she had a habit of dropping things, throwing out important pieces of paper, and thwarting doctors. She once got one to admit he didn’t know the difference between bacterial and viral infections. The father remains more elusive. He dressed well, liked driving, playing pinball, eating and watching TV. These shallow details are an admission of defeat. You don’t bring back the dead with bingo. But that’s the point of this atheistic diatribe: there’s no coming back.
• Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport is published by Galley Beggar. Ordesa by Manuel Vilas, translated by Andrea Rosenberg, is published by Canongate (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
