OF SAINTS AND MIRACLES, family tragedy that creates a folk hero

OF SAINTS AND MIRACLES
MANUEL ASTUR (tr. Claire Wadie)
New Vessel Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This mesmerizing novel opens with a fratricide in a beautiful if impoverished region of northern Spain.

The perpetrator, Marcelino, lives alone in his parental home where he recalls having doted on his baby brother and sought to protect their mother from their father’s drunken rages. Author Manuel Astur’s poetic language and seamless blend of lyricism with the grotesque renders this book a treasure for the reader that includes the mother’s bewitching tales about the sun, the moon, and an invisible horse-drawn carriage of death. Glimpses into other villagers’ lives reveal a community that gathers to slaughter pigs for feasts and to confront a mysterious plague of white worms.

The mountainous green of rural Asturias is as much a character as these residents, from whom Marcelino flees to the wild peaks after his brother’s slaying, becoming a cult hero as he evades authorities. Of Saints and Miracles is a sensuous portrayal of an outcast’s struggle to survive in a chaotic world of both tragedy and magical splendor.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What startled me most was being in medias res, knowing the murderer from the get-go and the inside out. That is a subversion of expectations that made me stick to the tale as it was being told. Normally I read murder-themed stories while looking for clues and hints from the off. I was made to think a different way about this true-life tale.

It worked in this read's favor, as the way the story's written is a joy to read:

When you see a weed in the vegetable plot you pull it out. When you've got more chickens than you need, you wring the neck of one and chuck it in the pot. When some dog mounts your bitch and she gives birth to a litter, you choose the best puppy, put the rest in an old potato sack with some stones and throw the sack in the river. When an apple tree no longer bears fruit, you cut it down and chop it up for firewood. When the grass in your field gets too long, you cut it, gather it up and store it in the hayloft. When a man in a suit comes and shows you some papers and tells you some stuff about mortgages and wants to take away your vegetable plot, your hens, your bitch and your fields, you defend yourself. Even if this man in a suit is your brother. And they can call you a revolutionary and talk about you on TV and in the papers and say who knows what about the oppressed peoples, or the last remaining guerrilla, but the truth is simpler, it's always simpler. And the truth is that you have to do what you have to do.
–and–
(Marcelino/)Leno's mother told him to give the little old lady a kiss. She smelled of cookies, earth, and bleach. Then she gave a toothless smile like a baby magpie and made a gurgling sound as if she had sand in her throat. She gurgled some more and his mother understood, even if he didn't. That was about all he could remember of the old world. The yellow smell of human piss and past lives filled with misery. A white washbowl with a tear shaped chip in its enamel, glowing in the darkness like an apparition. A one-eyed ginger cat asleep at the old woman's feet. A tatty old oil cloth on a rickety table. A few empty hooks, blackened by grease over the years. A handful of dried ears of corn tied up in a piece of cloth. Shadows dancing on the filthy wall. That's about it.

You like it, you don't...I don't think anyone can make much of a case that this isn't a robust storytelling voice. The way the voice comes across in telling this sad, brutal tale of a simple man solving problems he doesn't understand as best he can suited this reader as well as anything could.

The fearsomeness of committing a fratricide is never far from Marcelino's mind.

You see, this wound hurts just as much as yesterday’s wound, which hurt as much as the one before, and the one before the one before that, and as much as the first wound, the original wound that the first man feared. And though this wound is bleeding in the same way as all wounds bleed, and blood has always been the same, this wound thinks itself unique.
–and–
Death is never heroic. Life can be, but not death. Death comes to us all, but we know that if a woman watches over us on our deathbed, we’ll go to heaven.
–and–
All the dead are good because they are no longer alive and can therefore be imagined. As with fools and saints, we can lie about them because they can't defend themselves. They are a tale with countless morals, in illustration of whatever you like, a myth to be molded. The dead don't belong to the dead; the dead are ours.

These are simple thoughts, basic, grounded—even rooted—in the life of a man who has no sophisticated veneer to hide his innocent belief that the world can, and must, be made to make sense. Even or especially when it doesn't. Marcelino, based on a man called Tomasín whose life ended in exactly this concatenation of nightmares, becomes a symbol of the distant and rural province of Asturias's resistance to the rapidly modernizing economy of Spain after Franco's 1975 death. No one who's ever had a credit card or a cellphone contract won't, in some small way, fail to comprehend this desire to see someone stick it to The Man. No one whose family is normal won't, in some small way, recognize the urge to commit murder of a sibling who's just done you dirt.

Author Astur set out to tell us a story of a world, an old one, that is losing its battle to remain as it is. A world that pays attention, not compound interest. A world where Marcelino, salt of the Earth that he is, can be so in tune with Life that it becomes Art before his fulfilled eyes:

Just as a sun-soaked stone radiates heat for a while after nightfall, there is a point on still summer evenings whe objects appear to shine, as if to give back part of the generous daylight they've received. In such moments, Marcelino would stop what he was doing — clod of earth on the hoe, spade sunk deep in the hay, scythe dripping with fresh green blood — to stand up straight, wipe his brow with the back of his hand and contemplate the valley below. Everything would be gleaming, chiming like a bell of golden light. He would let his eyes fill with sky.

And so, as the sun set on that July evening, Marcelino stopped and contemplated. The house, the stilt granary, the cart with its shaft reaching skyward, the dry straw, the ears of corn, the cows in a single spine coming home along the track, the dog’s bowl, the rusty drum among the nettles, the axe in the tree stump, the woodchips and the logs, the sawdust on the ground, even the moss that hugged the stones in the walls of the small vegetable plot, even the trees in the nearby woods and the mountain peaks: everything shimmered, silhouetted against the deep-blue sky, in which a single bright star heralded the coming of a new age. Everything, that is, except the large bloodstain in the sawdust, and his brother’s body, both so dark they seemed to trap the light, as if the black ink that was slowly flooding the valley was seeping directly from them, saturating the sky and drawing the shapes of bats, which began to dance around the yellowish light of Cobre’s lone street lamp.

We go into this read certain murder is Wrong, murderers must be caught and required to suffer punishment; and come out without such a comfortable Certainty. Did Marcelino do wrong by killing his wicked brother? Yeah. Was he Wrong, was his action a rip in the fabric of society?

Dunno about you, but I came out of this read not at all sure. Read it soon, tell me what you thought.