#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews HEAVEN by Manuel Vilas

Manuel Vilas writes in long, sweeping phrases. Whether each piece is technically speaking a poem or a short story – the book contains both forms, and the main difference seems to be the presence or absence of line breaks – he uses the same cadence, the same width of breath, the same surging sentences, which often burst through the limit of a single line. It can be almost lulling – almost, because every now and then Vilas breaks the rolling rhythm and pinches the reader (or just this reader), grabbing your attention. He does it by suddenly becoming literal and turning things inside out. For example: life itself lost the will to live, and is sick, / bedridden in a nursing home.

Storytelling runs in Vilas’s veins. His stories display attention to detail. He writes about various places (Paris, Biarritz, Costa Daurada, Lourdes, Mallorca, Cadaqués, Zaragoza, Barcelona – in one of the poems the protagonist calls himself the ‘gentleman of the peninsula’), about hotels and travelling, about sex on the boat or on the beach, about death, about food and drink (a lot!), about breathalysers and suicide, about climate change and cremation. His verse is frequented by the likes of Robert Graves and Chopin (‘and his slut of a girlfriend’), Pablo Neruda and Delacroix, Goya and Dostoyevsky, Aristotle and Ivan the Terrible. There is an occasional spark of humour too:

I have seen the spiritual essence of man’s life

dragging itself like an old cripple

down the street

in hope’s very own Chinatown

It’s always summer in the golden world he describes/creates, it’s either July or August, ‘the eternal cloud of summer’. It’s a world seen through the eyes of a lone, restless, conflicted man, always on the lookout for some kind of connection. Everything that Vilas describes the reader can see, smell, touch, taste. That’s quite a skill. And although I tend to feel more comfortable with poetry that is more concise, more ‘stingy’ with its words, I have to say that I did allow myself to be taken away by Vilas, I believed his world. For most of the time.

I went out to the city, wet and sad and in love with nothing.

I went through streets and bars, shops and promenades.

In love with nobody, damp, suddenly sober.

The light was arrogant, like a diva in the sky.

Reviewed by Anna Blasiak

HEAVEN

by Manuel Vilas

Translated by James Womack

Published by Carcanet (2020)

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Anna Blasiak is a poet, writer, translator, journalist and Managing Editor of the European Literature Network. Recently she translated According to Her by Maciej Hen, published a bilingual poetry and photography book with Lisa Kalloo Café by Wren’s St-James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime, and a book-length interview with a Holocaust survivor, Lili: Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation with Anna Blasiak.

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