Lives in stone

It took the warm recommendation of a colleague to give me the courage to face the 763 pages of the paperback edition of the novel. I thank her for it, I discovered an excellent novel. The novel brilliantly asks how to write individual stories and history.

Of course, "the voice of Pamano" are teeming and it is difficult to summarize. The author binds past and present through a teacher who found nowadays in a school promised to demolition, the hidden books of a teacher of the previous generation. The teacher, overshadowed by its problems of today - an unfaithful husband, breast cancer and a son who discovered his monastic vocation despite fiercely atheist parents - is passionate about the history of this teacher's role unclear during the Franco regime.

The Franco era is well restored. The story of these troubled times I also discussed the France of the Occupation, with its strong and its collaborators. The author weaves a mastery of the links past and present. Through three dimensions - time, space and the character - it creates a dialogue between eras and beings and reveals the complexity of individual stories outdated by history. The characters through the ages, gradually distil their truth and otherwise reread the past in terms of the revelations of this. Each in its own way illuminates the facts. Places persist but different characters roam the charge and the various meanings. Each leaves a stone like a cairn. The main narrator is a secondary character in the story, but his business predisposes to this role: writer (funeral). It said in a marble tomb what was the life of a person?