Above the Rain

March 15, 2021
A Spanish crime novel attempts to connect the dots across decades, countries, and continents as two nursing-home residents embark on a late-life search for meaning. Miguel is a widower and retired bank director in his 70s who is losing his memory to Alzheimer's. The slightly younger Helena has plenty of spirit and all her wits but has ended up in the same Spanish nursing home, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Following the suicide of another free-spirited resident, she realizes that time is short and life is fleeting. The pilgrimage she makes with Miguel defies credulity but ends with him in Sweden, alone. It is there that he notices a woman previously unknown to him and ponders how "people were mysteriously connected without ever realizing it." It seems that it is Helena who has connected them, however tenuously. More than a half-century and hundreds of pages earlier, the novel's prologue found Helena's mother committing suicide by drowning, and threatening to kill her daughter along with her, all because of a complication it takes the rest of the novel to unravel. Miguel also had a troubled childhood, and both have had troubled marriages and relations with their children. Skipping back and forth across countries and decades, the novel explores their separate family bloodlines, from war and politics through love that is as passionate as it is taboo. Even as Miguel loses Helena (along with his memory), their mutual sense of mission never flags. No one could criticize del �rbol for lack of ambition, though this novel finds his characters a little too much at the mercy of chance and fate, as the reader struggles to find reasons to care. With a penchant for the philosophical epic, del �rbol gets lost here in all the melodramatic detail.

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June 18, 2021

This translation of the contemplative 2017 novel by former police officer del �rbol (A Million Drops) spans decades and nations to tell an epic story about two death-haunted people trying to outrun their pasts. When Miguel and Helena meet in a nursing home in southernmost Spain--he a Spanish former bank executive in the early stages of Alzheimer's; she a Tangiers-born Briton whose mother tried to kill her as a child before killing herself--they find connection with one another. The suicide of a mutual acquaintance leads them on a journey to Sweden. There, in a separate narrative, Yasmina, a beautiful young Moroccan woman in a "complicated situation" with a deputy police chief, is forced to help pay off her loathsome grandfather's debt to the criminal underworld. The sprawling narrative, Vargas Llosian in scope, swells even further to include political undercurrents dating back to the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Francoism. Del �rbol writes insightfully about aging and the effects of generational trauma, and his characters are richly drawn, but too often they get bogged down by portentous dialogue. VERDICT Readers of his previous works will welcome the author's ambition, but fans of crime fiction may struggle with the meandering pace and abandon the story before he successfully pulls all the threads together. --Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

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