The Ocean

"El anhelo del océano es omnipresente en el libro" writes a reader, referring to the omnipresence of the sea as an emotional attraction in the Under the Walnut Tree. In effect, in the novel the ocean plays an important role as a spatial element and as a symbolic presence in the world of the protagonist. 

The Begining

 Under the Walnut Tree, the novel I wrote a few years ago and was published by MediaIsla in September 2013, is narrated in the fist person by the protagonist, Ari, a boy of undisclosed age. 

The first page of the narrative gives a first glimpse into the character's personality and points to the nature of the story that is going to be told by him to no one in particular.

 Here are some lines of the first chapter, titled "The End of Summer."

"Sitting there in class I felt like a caged animal. The wild, solitary beast I had imagined to be when playing alone in the woods all summer, had been trapped, cornered to submission by the rules of men. The teacher’s voice was a far away drone, something of a hypnotic spell calling me to sink back in my melancholic daydreaming. I couldn’t avoid looking out of the window to the wooded hills that rolled all the way beyond my sight into my Granddad’s land and the knoll where the black walnut tree, standing tall and imposing, was murmuring in the wind its ancient stories. The ones I had been enjoying all summer long as I spent hours of solitary wondering under its protective shade. Granddad had taught me to go there when in trouble with myself and let the mystery of my childish worries be absorbed by the quiet magnificence of the whispering tree and the surrounding landscape it commanded. Reclining on its bole many an evening I had learned to love the land of my ancestors, with its meandering rives and its hills that in successive increasing waves of green climbed to the coastal mountain range from the ample arch of the beach and dunes."

Reality and imagination

If in literature you are looking for a mirror of reality--and a truly clear mirror--do not read my Under the Walnut Tree, a novel that looks at reality through the looking-glass of fantasy. 

Reality is reflected in landscapes, characters and actions and also in a world that includes in it the realm of imagination, the fabulous side of reality.

Good commentary

I suppose every writer hopes to have readers, people who will take the time to go page after page unraveling the mystery of language and its ability to communicate in reading what was created in writing.

Like a music score in front of the interpreter, the literary text waits for the reader to play its melody and recreate with it the world of concepts, actions and emotions, impressions and images every literary work composes with only words, the words of our everyday language.  

Good interpreters, enthusiastic readers are what every writer hopes to have. Few are the ones who know of their readers or hear from them; none can be sure that someone has not only read, but enjoyed the experience as a personal enrichment, as an added wonder to their lives.

I should consider myself lucky to have received the following comment from someone who actually took my Under the Walnut Tree and for a few hours revived on her own mind the characters and their actions and desires. Someone who belonged for a short while to the world of my fantasy.

"I really enjoyed your novel--wrote this reader--, and have talked to NN, who was at your book reading the same evening I attended and we had a nice discussion over your novel. Have you started at least thinking of your second novel?… I sure hope so."

And, to be truthful, I also hope for the same.

Hopeful Fantasy

Reading should be fun and a source of joy. The intellect and sentiments should be engaged with ideas and emotions.

Both are very much present in my  novel Under the Walnut Tree, together with exhilarating flights of hopeful fantasy and an impressive geography.