The first impression is stunning. I don’t understand how the idea of seeing the history of Europe as a history of evil and culture and telling it on the example of the history of the violin of the XNUMXth century, which has survived to this day, could succeed. And why a huge novel about the history of ideas, which was created for eight years, did not turn out to be boring, and the move with the violin — primitive.
The fact that the whole story will be linked with the history of the instrument, I guessed only towards the middle of the book. Before that, the novel for me was about a boy from a strange Spanish family, with a cold mother, a closed father, about a lonely childhood among antiques. The hero of Cabré, Adria Ardevol, lives his life with books, a violin and his only friend, thinking about the fate of Europe and his own destiny. About why his father died and why his parents did not love him in childhood, and, however, did not love anyone. And now, by the age of 60, having learned that he has Alzheimer’s disease, Adria writes the story of his life — like a letter to his beloved. He keenly feels the soul of objects, as soon as he touches an old thing, he seems to see the reality of centuries ago. So the fragments of the confession are replaced by paragraphs about the Inquisition or about the Second World War, and the history of his violin turns out to be connected with the history of the tree from which it is made, and the forester who cut this tree, and further, step by step, until the history of Europe is linked into one line of loneliness, violence, betrayal and despair.
The second impression is an unanswerable question: why does it happen that we begin to love things more than people and see in them a soul that does not exist. Or is there? Cabré does not answer, but asserts: fear and doubt, lack of love form a void in the soul, which we try to fill with memorable things. This method doesn’t work. But you can follow Adria to try to realize that our parents, with all their oddities, loved us as best they could and knew how.
Translation from Catalan. Foreigner, 2015, 736 p.