Qalam an-najjar (O Lapis do carpinteiro - The Carpenter's pencil) - Tapa blanda

Críticas

I have learned more about the Spanish Civil War by reading The Carpenter's Pencil by Manuel Rivas than through all the history books. (Günter Grass, Nobel Prize of Literature 1999)

A strange and haunting novel... a sincere and beautiful portrait of a brutal, ugly period of Spanish history. (The Guardian)

El lápiz del carpintero brings together the taste of popular legends from around the world (Paris Match)

A profound tale of love, art, politics and the lingering effects of a gentleness and cruelty on the soul (The Miami Herald)

A startling novel. I have rarely read a piece of writing so poetic (Daily Telegraph)

The novel is magnificently structured... The language is rich... one of the best Spanish novels of recent years. It tells a story of great emotional power and speaks movingly of the ability of moral principle to resist fascism (Times Literary Supplement)

Rivas is a superb stylist in the Spanish tradition of less is more (Washington Post)

Magnificent (Le Monde)

Reseña del editor

"I did a lot of bad things, but when I was before the painter I murmured to myself that I was sorry, that I wished I didn't have to, and I don't know what he thought when our eyes met, a moist blaze in the night, but I want to believe he understood, he saw that I was doing it to save him torment. Without further ado, without moving from where I was, I put the pistol to his temple and blew off his head. And then I remembered the pencil. The pencil he carried behind his ear. This pencil..."

Set in the dark days of the Spanish Civil War, Qalam an-najjar charts the linked destinies of Dr Daniel Da Barca, the Republican who, like his Biblical namesake, cheats death in Franco's prisons, and Herbal, the illiterate Falangist and Da Barca's shadow and tail, and of the unnamed painter with the carpenter's pencil, the man who unites them in life and death. Marisa Mallo, loved by both Da Barca and Herbal; Pepe Sanchez, the bolero singer; "Genghis Khan", the wrestler; Dombod?n the Kid, the innocent; Mother Izarne, the nun. All are bound by the events of the Civil War-the artists and the peasants alike-and all are rendered, in Rivas's skillful hand, with the power of the carpenter's pencil, a pencil that draws both the measured line and the artist's fanciful vision.