#RivetingReviews: Mandy Wight reviews WHAT REMAINS by Brais Lamela, translated by Jacob Rogers
Between 1946 and 1955 a huge dam and hydroelectric plant was built at Grandas de Salime in North-West Spain by Franco, the Spanish dictator. This project transformed the river Navia into a huge reservoir, flooding the valley, and leading to the relocation of the rural population to newly built housing projects in the flatlands known as Terra Ché. The displacement of these rural people from Negueira de Muñiz is the subject of What Remains. But author Brais Lamela is not just telling a Galician story. With a subtle, light touch he uses this narrative to ask broader questions about home, belonging, displacement and migration.
The first section, Those Who Leave, begins in New York, where the narrator is a graduate student. He’s on a one year scholarship to complete his thesis on the rural colonies he grew up in at Terra Ché. The housing was designed along modern, American lines, the white houses of the colonists, those rows of identical structures that looked stranger in our native land than a Martian spacecraft. The professor points out the political choices implicit in the small, modern American kitchen of those uniform houses, where a woman would make food in isolated kitchens designed to deter after-dinner talk, to dissuade people from inviting guests, to make them feel alone in their own houses.
Ideas about space appear in the account of the narrator’s personal life, in the description of his tiny, thin-walled apartment, so very close to the throbbing noise of traffic from outside. There’s a feeling of fragility to the building, surrounded by scaffolding at present, which the narrator doesn’t dare tread out on to join his neighbours for a drink. And he later describes his furniture as shoddy, contrasting it with the solidity of a ledger he comes across in his research. And the feeling of impermanence is replicated in the brief snapshots of the friends he’s made in New York, a mostly hard up, transient crowd, in the city for a limited period, sharing museum entry cards and tips for survival.
In the second section, Those Who Return, the narrator returns to Spain, and goes on a trip with his father, brother and girlfriend Mariana back to Negueira de Muñiz. The narrator in the meantime has become intrigued by the story of a woman called Leonita whom he’s come across in his research. She was relocated to Terra Ché with her husband, but when he died she was ejected from her home by the authorities for reasons which are not entirely clear, but were probably because they saw her as a trouble maker.
While her story gives us the readers an idea of how the relocation played out for individuals, it also serves to illustrate a meta theme in the novel, namely how to write about these events. The narrator’s thesis is on the links between the American agri business and Franco’s plans to introduce cattle ranching farming methods in the Terra Ché. But he’s found himself continually sidetracked by the stories of individuals. It’s as if the narrator can’t help himself responding to the story on an imaginative level, and we see this when they arrive at the village of Elnes and he discovers the house that surely was Leonita’s. There’s a wonderfully evocative description of the old, decaying house, vines in the attic creeping in through holes in the stone walls. Then the chaos of suitcases and cloth sacks upstairs, less like a bedroom than a customs storage, the hold of an ocean liner full of emigrants.
Emigrants again. People in movement. We’re brought back at the end of the novel to a new community, many of them foreigners, who’ve moved into the villages and houses abandoned by the people displaced by Franco. Different languages are spoken, and teachers are yet to catch up with the children speaking a hybrid tongue. I loved the way this reshaping of community is echoed in one of the final images: that of the narrator’s father in his workshop refashioning some metal tubing buried in the ground back at Elnes into something different, a bracket for a lamp, I could hang an old tractor’s headlights from them … His father never stops, he’s always making something new out of what remains.
So this beautifully written book tells a story of displacement, but also invites us to see movement and emigration on a wider scale, as a continually evolving and dynamic human story. Rather than giving us an unremitting account of loss, it looks to the present and the future in its account of the community reforming in rural Galicia and the vibrant, albeit transitory, community of young people in New York. It’s a novel about the past, but also very much of our times.
Reviewed by Mandy Wight
WHAT REMAINS
Written by Brais Lamela
Translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers
Published by Bullaun Press (2025)
Mandy Wight has published several translations from German on the No-Mans-Land Website, including excerpts from novels by Ursula Krechel, Nina Jäckle, Ulrike Edschmid, Natascha Wodin and Monika Helfer. In 2018 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation for her translation of an extract from Juli Zeh’s novel Unterleuten. She writes on books in English and in translation at her blog Peakreads.
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