The voices of Pamano, Jaume Cabré
Each time I enter Jaume Cabré’s world, I feel absolutely taken aback by his narrative. It feels like he’s composing his own symphony – sad and beautiful – using words instead of score. With time his symphony grows greater and greater, praising History, Memory, Artist and his Creation, and yet it always comes back to the origin – a tiny human being in the center of the universe capable of both wonderful and horrible things, to remember and to forget, to create and to destroy, to love and to hate. For each bit of Cabré’s sophisticated symphony there’s a special theme. In The Shadow of the Eunuch he explores Memory and Family, in I confess he dwells on the question of Evil and how malevolence impacts our lives, in The Voices of Pamano Cabré studies Revenge and History and what both these forces are able to do to a single fragile human being.
There are a few topics to which Jaume Cabré keeps returning in every book of his I’ve read so far, or, I’d better say, there are a few stones which he repeatedly uses to build the world of his novel or short story. First of all, it’s History. Cabré has a unique ability to switch tenses in a smoothly flowing narrative as if there’s nothing more natural than going back in forth in time, changing centuries, settings, characters in a flash. This superpower gives him an opportunity to go as daring as he wishes, and create a story where there’d be a medieval monastery, Spanish Civil War, modern-day Vatican, SS officers and some antique store (and you wouldn’t even question how it all made its way into one book). Cabré is never shy about creating the historical background for his novels. In The Voices of Pamano he places a tiny village at the foot of the Catalan Pyrenees in the middle of The Civil War and then World War II and then – Francoist Spain, making a village where (seemingly) nothing happens, the epicentre of everything. At first glance, Cabré writes something resembling local history, where things make sense only being put into some context known to a few. One does not choose to write about an insignificant village teacher (who maybe was a member of the Falange and by indirection responsible for his pupil’s murder) Oriol Fontelles, when one is about to write about History and torn apart Spain. And yet this is exactly what one should do, if one wants to show how merciless History is and how the great and mighty who rule sitting in a fancy office affect lives of people in a tiny village lost somewhere in the mountains. On a scale that small every trait that we, human beings, possess, becomes more prominent – every treachery, as well as every act of kindness, is a matter of life and death; every brave deed takes a lot more courage as it’s done with a faint hope to make a difference in the world of the small, not in the world of the great; every war is a personal war; every man, being a part of the community, writes his own history as he lives, the one to be remembered or forgotten if only in the local context. To illustrate History, Cabré often paints a tiny aquarelle instead of a huge fresco which proves to be heartbreaking and heartfelt. The second stone is Memory. To remember means to exist. In Memory lies Cabré’s characters source of grief, comfort and motivation. It may be closely connected to History stone in this particular book, as the historical memory and a memory of individual are two driving forces in The Voices of Pamano. There’s Oriol Fontelles who wants to be remembered by his beloved ones as a man he really was, not as a man he was forced to become. There’s Tina Bros who feels obliged to pay tribute to a memory of someone she didn’t know. There’s Elisenda Vilabrú who’s burdened with her memories – one of the revenge she ought to take and one of love she needed to endure. To remember here never means to forget or to let go, and yet there’s also a faint memory of the necessity to forgive – both History and people. The third stone is Love of all sorts (the ancient Greeks would’ve been proud) - familial love, passionate love, brotherly love and the love for God. Love, though, is very rarely happy in Cabré’s stories. He prefers to explore bonds it makes between people and the consequences of these bonds. This means to focus mostly on parents who cannot reach an understanding with their children; on lovers who cannot be together; on brothers who betrayed one another, on God and the pious in vain search for blessing. And yet, in The Voices of Pamano love is a source of strength. A strength to rise after the fall, a strength to endure, a strength to revenge, a strength to carry on. Though never a strength to forgive.
The characters Cabré creates to build a novel out of those aforementioned three ‘stones’ travel throughout his books. Chances are that if you met a despotic father in your first Cabré’s novel, you’d meet him again and again, as well as you’d meet a God's fool or an infinitely loving person, or an unhappy woman bound to her family (mainly to her husband), or a faithful servant, or an unfaithful lover. It might have been boring, but Cabré’s effortless talent turns a repetition into a pantheon, giving Cabré an opportunity to use and explore every archetype as many times as he wishes. In fact, to me Cabré is a living proof of what a writer could do with narrative and every single word within it if he’s free (and gifted) enough to treat it without too much effort.
Every time I finish reading Cabré’s book, I end up thinking (despite all that I wrote above) that this particular book I’m holding in my hands right now is a stand-alone, the one I can safely call my favourite, and then comes the next favourite stand-alone. Therefore, as long as this chain goes on and on, I’m a lucky reader. However The Voices of Pamano is a stand-alone in a certain way. It’s the book I’d recommend to get acquainted with Cabré’s writing. Unlike The Shadow of the Eunuch or I confess which may seem overextended, The Voices of Pamano seems to be overexciting in regard of the plot which gives you an opportunity to enjoy both the way story unfolds and the story itself.
P.S. The Voices of Pamano is not translated into English, but it’s translated into Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, French, Greek, Polish and a few other languages.