Cremation

Translated by Valerie Miles The booming post-Franco years have left everything up for grabs along a stretch of the Mediterranean coastline of Spain: real-estate developers scramble to transform the once pastoral landscape into resorts, nightclubs, and beachfront properties with lavish pools. Cremation opens with the death of Matías, a paterfamilias who had rejected all of these changes and whose passing sets off a chain reaction, uncovering guilts and resentments that had been buried for years and leading those closest to him to question the paths they’ve chosen. In a rich mosaic narrative, filled with a hypnotic chorus of voices, Cremation explores the coked-up champagne fizz of luxurious parties and underworlds of political corruption, prostitution, and ruthless financial speculation. The novel follows the melancholy ouroboros of capitalist greed that led to the financial crash and captures something essential about our values, our choices, and our all-too-human mistakes. Like William Faulkner or Francis Bacon, Chirbes stares clear-eyed into the abyss and portrays us as we really are.

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