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An account by "the finest travel writer of the last century" of his journey through 1930s Spain in search of an ancestral tomb (The New Yorker). In the 1930s, Norman Lewis and his brother-in-law, Eugene Corvaja, journeyed to Spain to visit the family's ancestral tomb in Seville. Seventy years later, with evocative and engrossing prose, Lewis recounts the trip, taken on the brink of the Spanish Civil War. Witnesses to the changing political climate and culture, Lewis and Corvaja travel through the countryside from Madrid to Seville by bus, car, train, and on foot, encountering many surprises along the way. Dodging the skirmishes that will later erupt into war, they immerse themselves in the local culture and landscape, marveling at the many enchantments of Spain during this pivotal time in its history.… (more)
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In September 1934, the young Lewis embarked on a mission to Seville in search of his father-in-law’s ancestral tomb, which Corvaja hoped would be found in the cathedral. His son, Eugene Corvaja, travelled with Lewis. This is the account of their journey.
There are some very odd things about this book, not least that it appeared nearly 70 years after the journey it described, when Lewis was a very old man (he died very soon afterwards). It may be that Lewis intended it as part of his autobiography, published many years earlier - but then held it back, so that it remained unfinished business for years.
October 1934 saw a brief, violent conflict in Spain; it ended quickly, but was the precursor of the civil war that was to follow less than two years later. It was not the best time to be in Spain, as Lewis and Corvaja discover when they secure a place on an armoured train that takes them to Madrid. Here they alight to find themselves in the middle of a firefight, and as they dodge bullets to leave the station, Lewis notices a poster that assures them, in English, that “Spain Attracts and Holds You. Under the Blue Skies of Spain Cares Are Forgotten.”
The book is packed with bizarre incident. As the fighting comes to an end, the Lewis and Eugene Corvaja attend a bullfight, and see the rejoneador (a lead bullfighter who fights with a lance) apparently gored to death (“it was given out that he was dead”). They then decide to investigate a reported mania amongst Madrileños for drinking animal blood. They visit a slaughterhouse, but are “deterred by a woman on her way out, made terrible by the smile painted by the blood on her lips.” Later, on their way through Portugal, the pair hear of a witch-burning, no less, in a small village in Porto called Marco do Canavezes. They travel there to find that the story is substantially true.
The book sometimes raises questions it does not answer. Why would Corvaja senior send his son and his son-in-law on a quixotic journey through Spain in a time of trouble? Did they really hear of a witch-burning in Portugal? (Marco do Canavezes - actually Canaveses - is real enough, and is, oddly, the birthplace of the singer Carmen Miranda; but I can find no mention of the witch-burning story although that does not make it false.)
But does that matter? Why strain at a story of witch-burning in 1934, when a much larger outbreak of atavistic savagery was just beginning? For the most part, the narrative seems heartfelt; the journey clearly left an impression on Lewis and, like Laurie Lee a few months later, he was struck by the poverty (in Andalusia, they “pass through settlements of windowless huts consisting of no more than holes dug in the ground with branch and straw coverings …to take the place of roofs”).
The book is also alive with Lewis's descriptive genius. Thus he and Corvaja, stranded by the conflict, must walk from city to city through the countryside:
"…the rich gilding of summer returned to the Navarran landscape. …We moved across boundless plains of billowing rock purged of all colour by the sun. ...Behind the mountains ahead symmetrical and luminous and symmetrical clouds were poised without shift of position as we trudged towards them for hours on end. At our approach an anomalous yellow bloom shook itself from a single tree, transformed into a flock of singing green finches. Lizards, basking in the dust, came suddenly to life and streaked away into the undergrowth."
Therein lies this book’s great strength; besides being well-observed and well-written, it is like a trip through a wormhole; an almost covert glimpse of a world that has been forgotten. It is not perfect. but it does not have to be, for it has the freshness and warmth of a diary entry.
It is not that the writing or prose is strange – just the perception of what the book means to the professional reviewers and blurbers. “Witty”, they said
So, this reader at least found no Bertie Wooster moments and the author is, as always, far less boring than Henry James!
Instead I found a lyrical treatise on a country he obviously fell in love with “at first sight” and a moving account of the peoples of an earlier Spain, about to tear each other asunder in blood, bone-crushing terror and war.