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The #1 international bestselling phenomenon - a profound and riveting story of love, loss, and memory.
It seemed to me the state of my soul was a blurry memory of something that had occurred in a place in northern Spain called Ordesa, a place full of mountains.
A man at a crossroads in the middle of his life considers the place where he's from, and where his parents have recently died. In the face of enormous personal tumult, he sits down to write. What follows is an audacious chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing account of his life's trials, failures, and triumphs that becomes a moving look at what family gives and takes away.
With the intimacy of a diarist, he reckons with the ghosts of his parents and the current specters of his divorce, his children, his career, and his addictions. In unswervingly honest prose, Vilas explores his identity after great loss—what is a person without a marriage or without parents? What is a person when faced with memories alone? Already an acclaimed poet and novelist in Spain, Vilas takes his work to a whole new level with this autobiographical novel; critics have called it "a work of art able to cauterize pain."
Elegiac and searching, Ordesa is a meditation on loss and a powerful exploration of a person who is both extraordinary and utterly ordinary—at once singular and representing us all—who transforms a time of crisis into something beautiful and redemptive.
"This stunning work of autobiographical fiction will appeal more to mature readers, who will appreciate its autumnal tone and the catharsis of a man seeking to extract meaning from his past, uncertain whether he has found it or even if he can." - Library Journal (starred review)
"[V]ibrant...Despite lacking a central arc, the novel hums with magnetic and lively scenes. This is an indelible portrait of a man facing the costs of a life dedicated to remembrance." - Publishers Weekly
"Vilas...conveys—and Rosenberg smoothly translates—many moments of pain and happiness any reader might recognize as the narrator plunges into the maelstrom of closely examined memory. A dark and challenging but emotionally rich work." - Kirkus Reviews
"A book full of compassion towards the underdogs of history, the everyday men. An extraordinary book." - El País (Spain)
"Ordesa is a poet's novel, or maybe a novelist's prose poem. It's both things at once, and also the saddest and most candid autobiography I've read in recent times. I've been through this book twice and I still don't know how Vilas does it. I know, however, that this book is a gift, and maybe that's enough." - Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Shape of the Ruins
"[Ordesa] is the album, the archive, the memory without lies or consolation...What's left in the end is the clean emotion of truth and the distress of everything lost." - Antonio Muñoz Molina, author of Like a Fading Shadow
This information about Ordesa was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Manuel Vilas is one of Spain's most acclaimed poets and writers. Born in Barbastro, in the Huesca region of Spain, Vilas has published six novels, thirteen books of poetry, and has been widely published in newspapers and literary journals.
Andrea Rosenberg is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese. Her translations include novels and graphic narrative by Tomás González, Paco Roca, Inês Pedrosa, and Aura Xilonen.
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