Ordesa as a Portrait of Memory, Time, and Self
In a playful, self-created metonymy, the author imagines a novel where every character is named after a world famous musician. What might feel, at first glance, like eccentricity or bravado soon reveals itself as a manifestation of genius. In this fresh rereading, the reading experience shifts yet again, inviting a deeper encounter with a text that seems to stage its own realism with remarkable clarity.
Following the death of his mother, the protagonist stands at a crossroads of life. He is fifty, divorced, with two children, a former high school teacher, a writer, and someone who has been sober for several months. The narrative presents itself without a clear, traditional timeline. Instead, sentences unfold with a kind of emotional honesty, each line almost a cry of life made legible by the precise cadence of the typography. The typographic choice lends a steady, almost tactile reliability to the voice, aligning memory with the first person narration that brings the family story back to life on the page.
The book is built from 157 sections of varying length, most rarely extending beyond three pages and spread across a 352-page journey. Within these segments, themes and figures emerge without a strict outline, yet they become established through repetition and recall. The narrator keeps pace with recent events and long-standing memories, always returning to the influence of his parents, especially the father figure. The father’s voice and example seem to linger through the line, almost as if the father could be heard in the memory of the prose itself: a sense of style, formality, and a readiness to help, with a remark that links the narrator to a grand tradition by way of a musical comparison. The passage captures a moment of solitary detachment and longing, asserting that human suffering might be measured more by precise, concrete terms than by vague phrases. The narrator contends that every person eventually faces the weight of time passing. Yet the narrative mood remains intimate and unadorned, culminating in a tender sequence that revisits the year 1961, where time’s brutality is rendered in a luminous, almost ceremonial light. The book closes with a ten-poem afterword that maps the most important moments, sensations, and emotions from the narrator’s consciousness, blending everyday anecdotes with profound affect and existential reflection. The result is a work that feels both intimate and expansive, a life told through memory and heart.
Ordesa stands as a clear example of how a novel can base itself on what seems ordinary and still produce something magnificent. Its virtuosity arises from an attention to the ordinary that reveals extraordinary depth. The author, who is also a poet, fills each page with lived reality, letting the day-to-day feel true on every line and insisting that perception and lyric sensibility intertwine from start to finish.
The novel speaks directly to a specific era and to a generation, offering a voice on masculinity shaped by education and by the times. This identification comes alive through deft, clever prose. A memorable line about a father and his desk—its imperfect order, the importance of handwriting and yellowed pages—highlights how life itself can turn yellow, signaling the edge of dawn and a new beginning. The text invites readers to notice beauty in the ordinary and to hear life’s color in the smallest details .
Why read this novel? It is a work where self-editing becomes a central narrative technique, elevated by a high poetic register. As one reads, the yellow tone of life emerges, and since the book arrives at year’s end, the closing pages feel like a bridge between a year of wishes and a new beginning .