Author: Ricardo Menéndez Salmón
- Fiction
- Seix Barral - Agapea
- ISBN: 9788432209352
- Release Date: 01-01-2011
-Reviewed by: Sean Knowlton
Ricardo Menéndez Salmón’s La Noche Feroz is, at once, a straightforward, dramatic short novel detailing the aftermath of a brutal murderous assault and, at the same time, a measured examination of the darker side of human nature. As the title literally states, the events occur over the course of one cold November night in a rural Spanish village in 1936. This “fierce night” also serves as a metaphor for the grim nature of human existence and its tragic end.
Although the plot device is well defined and clear – a manhunt led by a zealous priest in search of the murderer(s) of a young, local girl – the real intent of the author, to this reader, is to use the events as allegory for the darkness of human nature on a larger scale. The author explores the shortcomings of his characters: their violence, cruelty, ignorance, isolation, fear, and fury as a condition of their time and place in history but, more so, as universal human conditions. The novel’s plot makes the ill-fated outcome of the manhunt clear early; yet, the story is original enough to be more than a simple murder mystery.
To serve this purpose, the novel moves at a deliberate, often poetic, pace. The style of writing is precise and descriptive, often to florid excess. The author carefully chooses his words in presenting characters and their particular situations. Yet, when they do speak, the characters employ an economy of plausible dialogue that, nonetheless, speaks volumes about their hidden desires and fears. The lean one hundred or so pages of this novel are arrested by the unhurried and charged narrative imagery that invites a more careful reading or re-reading. In spite of this, the author is careful to only suggest the root causes of his characters’ flaws, leaving the reader to imagine on her own the “fierce night” of each character’s essence. To this reader, however, the lack of a clearly expressed motive behind the murderer’s actions left the story wanting.
Although the novel is set during the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, this fact is essentially secondary to the story. True, it does provide a fittingly dark background in which to explore the gloomy, tragic events that occur in the village. In my opinion, many readers in the United States will be generally unaware of the details surrounding the political and social issues of 1936 in Spain as it entered Civil War. I, myself, confess my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War to be minimal. Thankfully, I believe that Guillermo del Toro has done this author a great favor by introducing American audiences to the time period and general locale through his 2006 Oscar-award winning film Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del fauno). Although the storyline is completely different and transpires in Aragón not Asturias, this film can provide an American audience, as it has for me, with a basic, necessary visual background: a difficult, hungry existence in a rural, mountainous Spain filled with brutal, unforgiving, and suspicious characters. Like in El laberinto del fauno, evil is an ever-present theme. Furthermore, the plotline, coupled with the extreme isolation of this fictional Asturian village (Promenadia) requires little to no historical knowledge from the reader. The fact that the rural town people are poorly educated, deeply religious, and suspicious of outsiders is enough, in my opinion, to sufficiently set the scene.
I believe this novel to be suitable for translation, primarily due to subject matter that explores the universal theme of the darkness of human nature. It is a common theme in literature and film, true, but one that this author treats in an original way, worthy of reflecting upon here in this novel.
Fierce Night is a title that is concise, powerful, and demands attention. Still, care should be taken not to represent it as a horror novel to avoid, at first glance, association with Fright Night, a 1985 horror movie remade poorly in 3D in 2011.
