No. 25 - Its Gran Canaria Magazine

36
GET TO KNOW GRAN CANARIA I CONOCE GRAN CANARIA EDICIÓN 25
Numerous authors have used the islands as a setting for their stories
The Canary Islands, a land of fiction
Alexis Ravelo Agatha Christie JG Ballard
By Cayetano Sánchez
The sudden death of a home-grown author some
weeks ago left Canarian literature without its most
recognised modern day voice. Alexis Ravelo, mainly
through his crime novels, won many prestigious
literary prizes, while occupying a prominent place
among the leading Spanish writers from this century.
Eladio Monroy is the name of the unlikely detective
in his tales of intrigue, where he brings to light
society’s darkest and most unjust goings on. His
passing leaves orphans not only to his fervent readers,
but also to scholars of the urban geography of
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the place in which his
dark stories were set.
Despite being its most recent narrator, Alexis Ravelo
was not the first to set some of his storylines
in the Canary Islands; for example, Agatha Christie,
in 1932, used them as a setting. The mysterious
death of Amy Durrant on the beach of Las Nieves
(Agaete) is the central plot of The Companion, one
of her short stories. The so-called "queen of crime"
was a regular visitor to Puerto de la Cruz and Las
Palmas de Gran Canaria in those years, and she recorded
this in her autobiography, where she points
out, among other things: "Las Palmas still seems to
me an ideal place to rest in the winter months... It
had two perfect beaches; the temperature was also
perfect; the average was 21 degrees, which for me
is the ideal summer temperature". The Metropol
Hotel became her habitual residence, and in the
aforementioned story it is the place where the only
fiction in which the British writer explicitly locates a
work on the islands begins: "The story takes place
in Gran Canaria, not Tenerife," the narrator, an English
doctor, says. “The next day I had planned an excursion
with some friends. We were to drive across
the island to a place called - I can hardly remember...
It's been so long! Las Nieves, a bay where we
could bathe if that was our wish". The Companion is
one of the most popular stories out of all those that
have used the islands as the territory of novelistic
plots, which are a far cry from the real stories of illustrious
travellers who in previous centuries visited
the Canary Islands as chroniclers. All of them, to a
certain extent, followed the trend of recording the
existence of some distant islands, as Pliny, the first
to write about the name of the islands, had done, at
the same time as he shed light on their goodness.
An exotic place
Either as a remote territory, as a place of historical
events, or as a sinister or mysterious space, without
forgetting the most universal stories, the Canary Islands
have a place in the history of literature that
goes beyond the plots set on the islands created by
Canarian authors. For the most famous best-selling
author from the islands, Vázquez Figueroa, the Canary
Islands have been a recurrent territory in his
works, as demonstrated in his latest work, Garoé. In
the category of Canarian authors who have highlighted
the islands, we must also include, among
others, Carmen Laforet, who set the plot of La isla y
Los Demonios during her years of residence in Gran
Canaria in the 1950s.
"
"The Canary Islands have a place
in the history of literature that
goes beyond the plots set
on the islands created
by Canarian authors"
This brief, and evidently incomplete, look at fiction
in the Canary Islands will, however, only focus on
the best-known authors, or on unusual titles which
have used the islands as a setting for their subject
matter. These are novels, but it is worth mentioning
other styles, such as drama, with Lope de Vega's
Los Guanches de Tenerife, or a poem by Emily
Dickinson dedicated to the Teide, even though she
hardly ever left her small Massachusetts town: "Ah,
Tenerife, receding mountain, purples of ages halt
for you...”
Different genres
Others include Azul y Otros Relatos del Mar, by Cuban
writer Emma Romeo, and Orquídeas Negras
by Spaniard Juan Bolea, authors who follow in the
footsteps of earlier writers, such as Ignacio Aldecoa,
who, apart from his Cuaderno de Godo, set several
of his stories on the islands. In recent years, this
geographical location has appeared in writers and
titles such as: Soria Moria by Espido Freire, La Senda
del Drago by José Luis Sampedro, La Niebla y la
Doncella by Lorenzo Silva, El Rey de Taoro. Historical
novel of the conquest of Tenerife by Horst Uden, La
Sima del Diablo by Frenchman Heins Delam and,
Apocalipsis Z, Los Días Oscuros by Manel Loureiro,
a zombie story set in Tenerife... Many of these
titles are easy to find in bookshops, and information
on them is readily available, unlike others that
are perhaps more distant, and even less famous.
One of them may be The Thompson Agency, a little-known
novel by Jules Verne in which he satirises
British tourism in the last third of the 19th century.
However, what begins as a sarcastic portrait turns
into an adventure novel set in the Canaries, Madeira
and the Azores which, after depicting island scenes
and landscapes, culminates in a shipwreck in Gran
Canaria. The Romance of Doctor Harvey Leite by
Archibald J. Cronin, published in the 1930s, tells the
gruesome story of an alcoholic English doctor who
redeems himself by saving lives in a Gran Canaria
devastated by yellow fever.
Dystopian Gran Canaria
Also on this island, decades later and in the same
apocalyptic tone, the writer/visionary J. G. Ballard
sets one of the stories of Myths of the Near Future,
Having a Wonderful Time, where a tourist discovers
that there is a plan by the governments of Europe
to turn the island into a permanent holiday camp
for workers, in combination with the Spanish authorities,
and for this reason it has been divided into
zones for the English, Germans and French. Aware
of this situation, Richard decides to join the resistance
operating on the island, but is killed. Despite
the unfamiliarity of the description of Tenerife's
capital, a different tone is set by Paul Bowles' The
Fourth Day Out in Santa Cruz, an account of a crewman's
time in the city.
Despite José Saramago's long stay in Lanzarote, the
island never featured in any of the Portuguese writer's
fiction, unlike it did in Cuaderno de Lanzarote,
a book that covers a multitude of genres, but not
a novel. On the contrary, Mexican writer Carlos
Fuentes chose the island as the setting for a key
chapter in one of his most celebrated novels of the
late 1990s, Los Anos Con Laura Díaz. In it, the protagonist,
after whom the book is named, arrives on
the island in the 1940s in search of her lover, Jorge
Maura, a refugee there after the Civil War; and that
setting is the end of their relationship: "Jorge Maura
stopped for a moment in front of the black earth
strewn with alveoli, within sight of Timanfaya. The
mountain was a blazing red colour, like a gospel of
fire”.
More controversial for the island was the publication
of Lanzarote, at the centre of the world, by the
controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq,
which depicts it as a place full of tourists doing unexpected
things to fill their leisure time at the beginning
of the 21st century.
These are just a few examples of how the Canary
Islands have also been a land of inspiration.