![]() If they had a very small fixed monthly income, things could have been different. pays in the end ultimately the cost of supposedly free paradise-the humble pleasures of nature? remarks to himself, “The sunshine and the sea don’t cost us anything.” Yet of course they do. He thinks they both made a mess of this simple, reachable dream.īut is it reachable? J. That's why the person who writes the letter in the middle of the book is so angry. But I don't think their failure was predetermined. In order to do that, the storm itself-J.'s violent death-had to be mentioned. I tried to create in the reader the feeling of something similar to the gathering of a storm. J.’s downfall on the finca is heavily foreshadowed from the very beginning you say he bathed in the spring “until the end,” you refer to “the corpse,” and “his last two winters on earth.” Does this merely create an ominous feeling of doom, or are we meant to see J’s life and failure on the finca as fatally predetermined? and Elena-and their attempt to grasp a simple life by the sea drift into the fey realm of mythology. Thus disconnected from any biographical counterparts, the characters-J. At the beginning of our correspondence over email, González expressed his wish not to speak of his brother or of the novel as a true story-which he’d already done a great deal already-but rather to discuss it as a work of fiction. González has written six novels and a poetry collection since In the Beginning Was the Sea, which is actually based on the true life and death of his brother, an eerie fact that does not drag the story into nostalgia or sentimentalism the telling remains removed, almost reporterly. But the gradual deterioration stems not from external forces so much as the couple’s own inner unravelling the solitude and placid obduracy of the sea cannot calm the demons they’ve carried from their previous life and eventually, inevitably it seems, tragedy ensues. Indeed, things soon begin to go wrong on the finca. The lyrical, haunting story has the feel of a fable-a young man and his beautiful wife abandon their hectic, intellectual, night-clubbing life in the city to buy a farm on an undeveloped stretch of coast-while the spare, disquieting prose suggests the start of an art-house horror film. It does not store any personal data.In the Beginning Was the Sea is Colombian writer Tomás González’s first novel, written in 1983 and only recently published for the first time in English by Pushkin Press (in Frank Wynne's translation). The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". In addition to certain standard Google cookies, reCAPTCHA sets a necessary cookie (_GRECAPTCHA) when executed for the purpose of providing its risk analysis. This cookie is used to enable payment on the website without storing any patment information on a server. This cookie is set by Stripe payment gateway. ![]() These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. ![]() Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. ![]()
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