Ordesa, Vilas, Manuel

A man at a crossroads in the middle of his life returns to the small mountain town where he was born and where his parents have recently died. In the face of enormous personal tumult, he sits down to write. What follows is a dizzying, audacious chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing account of his lifes trials, failures, and triumphs that becomes a moving look at what family gives and takes away.

In the shadow of the Pyrenees, 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. Narrated in a single sitting with unswerving honesty, 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? Vilas is an acclaimed poet and novelist in Spain, but this autobiographical novel takes his work to a whole different level: critics have called it a work of art able to cauterize pain.