South from Granada

Resumen del libro

I'd always shied away from Brenan's book because everyone said it was a classic, I'm wary of these as they usually entail a great deal of fine writing' and showing off on the part of the author. I'd also heard that it included accounts by Brenan of visits to his remote Spanish village by Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf in the 20s, the whole thing had a slightly fusty Bloomsbury feel about it which scarcely made me want to read it. But, as I was on holiday this summer south of Granada, about twenty miles from Brenan's village in Las Alpujarras, I thought I'd better give it a try. I discovered that I couldn't have been more wrong about the book; it's vigorously written, deeply sympathetic to the local culture without being sentimental and provides a fascinating portrait of the author himself.

Brenan came out of the First World War trenches feeling sick of Western civilization. He sought somewhere remote and unknown where he could hole up and recuperate, and he found the perfect place in the village of Yergan, between Granada and the Mediterranean, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was then an unimaginably remote place, virtually self-sufficient because of the fertile soil and the waters that came off the mountains. He writes with a clear eye of the villagers' anti-clericalism, their family feuds, their courting rituals and of the two village prostitutes. He also writes of long trips to the coastal town of Almeria and the city of Granada; trips that feel like feats of endurance as they're undertaken by foot or on donkey.

For the modern the book has an almost unbearable sense of poignancy, as it was in Andalucia that some of the most terrible atrocities of the Spanish Civil War were to take place ten or fifteen years later. There is one other curiosity about the book that makes it intriguing. Just a few miles west along the valley lies the village where Chris Stewart farms today. Compare and contrast his account in Driving over Lemons of an Englishmen in Las Alpujarras in the 90s with Brenan's stay there 60 or 70 years earlier.

Biografía del autor

Gerald Brenan nació en Sliema (Malta) en 1894, y pasó su infancia en la India, Sudáfrica e Inglaterra. Combatió en la Primera Guerra Mundial y, deseoso de alejarse del asfixiante mundo victoriano, llegó a España en 1919. Tras residir unos años en Yegen (La Alpujarra), en 1934 se trasladó a Churriana y, semanas después de estallar la Guerra Civil, a Gibraltar. Mantuvo estrechas relaciones con el grupo de Bloomsbury, del que se distanció con el paso de los años. Partidario del bando republicano, no pudo regresar a España hasta 1953, año en que reanudó su vida en La Alpujarra, hasta su muerte, acaecida en Alhaurín el Grande (Málaga) en 1987. Es autor de diversos estudios fundamentales sobre la historia y la cultura españolas, entre los que destaca El laberinto español. Viajero curioso, y atento siempre tanto al detalle como a la reflexión más iluminadora, Brenan cultivó, además del género memorialístico, la ficción y la poesía.