Under the Gypsy Moon

August 29, 1990
Thornton's ( Imagining Argentina ) distinctive gift as a novelist--his ability to compellingly evoke the era of which he writes and to create characters whose lives epitomize a critical period of history--is again manifestly evident in this work, set in the decade encompassing the Spanish Civil War and WW II. Here he tells the story of two writers--one real, one fictitious--who succumb to the forces of fascism but whose works transcend their time and place to speak eternal truths. A chance meeting with the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca transforms the destiny of Joaquin Wolf, a half-Spanish, half-German novelist. Lorca's murder by the Guardia Civil and Joaquin's own experiences in the bombing of Guernica are the first in a chain of events in which both writers' livesstet lives per sss take on a mesmerizing similarity. The narrator, Joaquin's lover, Ursula Krieger, recognizes that Lorca's poem Romance Son ambulo has an uncanny relevance to the tragic experiences she recounts. In the novel's denouement, the poem also supplies a union of insight and faith. delete? yes, probably. I'd like to see the whole thing again after it's cleaned, and then decide. Thornton's prose is illuminated by sharply visual, surrealistic metaphors. His interwoven plot lines are ingeniously conceived and developed, but the portentously monotonous voice of the narrator, while appropriate to her haunted personality, in some respects distances the reader from the characters' emotions. Still, this book should be read for the searing intensity of Thornton's imagination.