Told from a few views, it’s a tale of grief, resilience, reduction and hope. I hope you will shake hands with me prior to you go, Hector. The fatalism can come to be unintentionally comedian, but have any other novels been quite so crammed with prurience, grotesquery and crazed ambition, with this sort of a feeling of landscape (the sea, the fields, the town) as the malevolent crusher of human hope?