Bøker av Xelís de Toro

Vicente was raised in a Galician community in Northwest London, but prefers to establish his own identity further south, in Stockwell, where he lives in a squat with Andy, Patrick and the Lizard. They are professional jugglers and eke out a living putting on performances of Harlequin and Pierrot. When not performing, they play poker using potato chips. Vicente also does odd jobs for an Irishman called Reddy. He takes Jane, a woman he has just met, on a date to his favourite Portuguese café, where they serve galão coffee and custard tarts, but the date doesn't go to plan, Vicente is somehow distracted. That is until, on his way to the local takeaway to stock up on potato chips, he comes across a pistol that has been discarded in a rubbish bin and decides to take it home. The band of jugglers use this pistol to carry out a hold-up at a nearby off-licence, which goes disastrously wrong. Three of the friends have little choice but to seek refuge from the police in Galicia, where Vicente has some land he inherited from his parents, but will he be able to adapt to life in his homeland? And what will happen if he returns to England only to find his place has been taken by another, his role on stage has been usurped? The Clowns from Paradise is a rich, multi-layered narrative that forces the reader to re-evaluate the characters and props we take for granted.

A boat with the charred body of a man crucified on its mast turns up at the mouth of the river in Romero, a town on the frontier. The boat belongs to the owner of the printing-firm that publishes the local newspaper. He engages Marqués, who is from the east coast and claims that he can write, to head upriver to find out the causes of the boatman’s death. His only deckhand is a mestizo boy called Cordel who’s learned his trade from the previous boatman (‘What you steer isn’t the boat, it’s the river’). They soon reach the mission, which is staffed by a single friar, Father Bento (‘He seemed to chew his words like a cow chewing grass before releasing them in short bursts’). The friar asks if Marqués has come to judge, to govern or to execute. ‘To tell,’ is his answer, ‘I’m a writer.’ Marqués, however, soon falls into a fever and has to be cured by the healing-woman from the local Aventurei Indian tribe. He realises that entering the world of the river is like clambering up a liquid wall on which there are no ledges or crannies for hands and feet to cling to. There is an obvious parallel between this narrative and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the journey is an end in itself and the reader doesn’t know what secrets the river will reveal. There is also the writer’s own personal journey in search of fulfilment through his art. Marqués and Cordel will be joined on board by Rufus the Strongman and Ela, circus workers, as they struggle to come to grips with the tangle, both real and imagined, of the jungle. Xelís de Toro is a Galician performance artist, musician and award-winning writer based in the south of England. He is the author of five works of adult fiction (Feral River being the most recent), several children’s books and a book of poetry that was published by Pighog Press in a bilingual Galician-English edition, The Book of Invisible Bridges. John Rutherford is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford. He founded and directed the Centre for Galician Studies at Oxford, which is now named after him. He has translated Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta for Penguin Classics. His other translations include The Book of Invisible Bridges by Xelís de Toro and Halos by Xosé María Díaz Castro.