Speak Sunlight: A Memoir

by Alan Jolis

Book Overview

The author of Mercedes and the House of Rainbows describes a cherished childhood summer in Franco's Spain with his family's married cook and butler, recalling sunlight-drenched days spent in the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312140495
• ISBN13: 9780312140496
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 177 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A Sensuality-Steeped Memoir of Beauty and Love

Alan Jolis was the son of a Paris embassy official, a privileged boy, who spent every summer with his parents' married housekeepers, Maruja and Manolo, in their native Galicia, one of the provinces of Spain. As Jolis puts it, he was "little Lord Fauntleroy...abandoned in a leper colony." For this was Franco's Spain and Galicia was scrub-poor.In this sensuality-steeped memoir, Jolis tells us how he loved to toss coins onto the railroad tracks so the trains would flatten them and make "Franco disappear." "In place of his military uniform and round face," Jolis writes, "there is a shiny blankness, smooth as a mirror.""We are subversives," one of Jolis' uncles said. "Franquistas hate free time." Jolis' days in Spain are, however, carefree, and he spends his time attempting to stomp the tails off lizards, eating paella, talking with a donkey named Ludvino and tasting wine so dark and heady that it made his mouth "pucker with tannin." Later, he would even run with the bulls in Pamplona, be doused with tar by gypsies and stumble into secret Basque separatist cafés. His eye for detail is camera precise and stunning. In Galicia, he writes, "the black-shawled crones hiss at girls who wear skirts that reveal their kneecaps."The set-piece on bullfights is one of the best in literature and so filled with sensual impressions that you come away from it feeling as though you, yourself, are drenched with sun, blood and wine. Jolis notes, quite correctly, that "bullfights are the only events that start on time in Spain." He also explains a special move made only by matadors, one in which the matador swipes his cape gracefully over the bull's face much "as the saint did to Christ."Maruja and Manolo, however, are the central figures of Jolis' boyhood and the love among the three is all-pervasive. Jolis felt cherished by this couple, and their Spain, dusty, beautiful and sunburnt, became his as well. "To love," wrote Jolis, "is to allow yourself to be haunted." Anyone who is privileged enough to read this gorgeous memoir will come away haunted, as well. Haunted and infused with the rich images it presents and the love it so clearly evokes.

A luminous memoir of growing up in Spain in the 60's

My favorite memoir of the year! Alan Jolis treats his childhood the way I'd like to remember mine -- with luminous detail, vivid recall of the inner experiences, glowing love. Nice epiphany -- to love is to allow yourself to be haunted.