Review Rewind: IN THE WILDERNESS

Please take some time over the weekend to experience once again the effusive praise we've been accumulating for In the Wilderness by Manuel Rivas, translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne. Especially good for East Coast Baseball rainouts and halftime during NBA Playoff blowouts.--Jim

"It's not often that we are gifted with an English translation of an artful and unique novel initially written in the Gallician language of Northwest Spain. And so the Overlook Press arrival of Manuel Rivas' fantastical and wholy original novel In the Wilderness is doubly to be celebrated. In the Wilderness is the tale of animals and people, and animals who are people. As its short chapters unfold, introducing readers to characters like the priest who is reincarnated as a mouse, the television producer is metamorphosed into a lizard, and the fox who remains a fox, Rivas subtly tells us as much about ourselves as he does about the historical tenor and traditions of the region that created him and his art."--Hispanic

"Although In the Wilderness, an extraordinary blend of fable, humor, folk tale, fantasy and romance, is in many ways the furthest thing from a historical novel, it is also marked by a delicate yet real sense of history.... funny, lyrical, sensuous, crisp and — like a deep-running stream — clear yet complex." --Los Angeles Times

"Animals have human souls--literally--in the Spanish novelist Manual Rivas' darkly dazzling vision of purgatory in 1980s Galicia: A rabbit-hunting priest and his poacher nemesis are reincarnated as mice; a crime-TV producer returns as a meditative lizard; a dethroned king and his troubadours take wing as crows. In a series of tightly coiled lyrical vignettes, these furred and feathered wayfarers mingle, quarrel, and observe the struggling humans in their midst, including an embittered housewife, her mute horseman brother, and an artist who turns subversive graffiti slogans into ad copy. Buoyed by Jonathan Dunne's supple translation, IN THE WILDERNESS is by turns as timeless as Almodavar, and as crammed and unruly as a Picasso painting. A" --Entertainment Weekly