Spanish Literature: In the middle of a storm, a young girl, Rosa, takes refuge in her local church, where the statues of saints come alive before her and an audience of the three hundred crows of Xallas, metamorphosed warriors of the ancient King of Galicia.
But the saints are in fact sinners, according to Don Xil, the parish priest who himself becomes metamorphosed into a mouse living in the stove-pipe in Rosa's kitchen. With these quasi-mythical yet real characters Manuel Rivas opens his novel, In the Wilderness, now handsomely translated by Jonathan Dunne.
Having begun his career as a poet, Rivas has made a name for himself in recent years as a short-story writer and novelist. The Carpenter's Pencil (Harvill), a hauntingly optimistic tale of two men caught on opposites sides during the Spanish Civil War, is a superb novel. And Butterfly's Tongue (Harvill), also set in Civil-War Spain, was adapted for the cinema in 2000 to widespread acclaim. Indeed, Rivas is one of the few contemporary Galician writers whose work is being translated directly into English without first passing through Castilian.
Rivas is widely recognised as one of the most promising voices in contemporary Hispanic fiction, though In the Wilderness is a rather esoteric novel for the uninitiated.
Quirky and touching, like all the author's fictions it combines intense lyricism with a fragmented narrative. It is tempting to see this as a kind of Galician magical realism, but such an overused label disguises Rivas's originality in injecting the delicacy of poetry into humdrum life.
If In the Wilderness has any semblance of a conventional plot, it is in the depiction of Rosa and her family. Their harsh existence, including the scene of brutal marital intercourse which ends the novel, explodes the stereotypical idyll of a magical Galicia untainted by the modern world - a trope not unfamiliar to Irish readers of fictions of the West. Contrasting with this largely realistic narrative strand are the chapters which revolve around the various mythical figures reincarnated as animals who constitute, in Rivas's words, "a chaotic festival of the memory".
Yet, as so often in fiction, the most effective parts of the novel are not those set in the realm of fantasy, but those which tread the frontier between the magical and the mundane. When the child Rosa is told the sacred legend of the warriors-become-crows, her brother pipes up that he once saw a crow eating a bag of cheese and onion crisps. And the final, achingly humane, image of Rosa picking flowers, watched by Toimil (the field mouse-cum-henchman of the King of Galicia), leaves the reader in considerable doubt as to the novel's factual outcome, but in no doubt about Rivas's optimistic celebration of the poetic spirit's resilience in the face of the trials of both life and death.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is lecturer in Spanish at University College Dublin
In the Wilderness. By Manuel Rivas, translated by Jonathan Dunne. Harvill, 170pp. £9
de Menezes