“La Despedida”
is a short book written by Juan Pedro Castañeda, a Canarian author born in the
island of El Hierro (Canary Islands) in 1945. This book is not considered a
novel because of its extension, roughly 100 pages (111 in the 1977 edition). It
has an omniscient narrator that talks in third person and changes the way it express
itself depending on the person it’s talking about.
Each of the four
chapters tell the same story but from the perspective of each character. Little
by little, having access to all character’s personal experiences, the reader
gets the whole picture. After reading the first chapter, one can easily feel lost
in the plot, but slowly it starts making sense.
Most of the
story occurred in the island of Tenerife. It is a love triangle between Juan,
Mary and Fernando. To make a long story short, Fernando is an “indiano” from
Venezuela. “Indianos” are islanders that went to America, usually to Venezuela
or Cuba, to make money. Fernando left her girlfriend Mary behind, and later she
started a relationship with his best friend, Juan. But when Fernando came back
to Tenerife for a short period of time, Mary left Juan and got engaged to
Fernando. Because he had to go back to Venezuela, it was a proxy weeding. After
the ceremony Mary took a boat and went to America, but the marriage did not
last and she came back to the Canary Islands. Meanwhile, Juan tried to get over
Mary, but he died before she returned.
What I really
like about this book, besides the literary technic, is the historical background.
The plot takes place in the years after the Spanish Civil War, and it shows a
poor country where people struggle to survive. The book was written in 1975,
and published in 1977, and I wonder if this direct criticism could have been made
if Franco was still alive.
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