The Road to Zarauz
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Parthian Books
Published:1st Jul '20
Should be back in stock very soon
It is the summer of 1954. Four young men, on a summer vacation buy an old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all the way to the mountains of Spain. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamers and realists, men but not much more than boys. This will be their summer to remember.The Perseids brought it all out of the past, with a force like a blow that leaves you winded. The night lurched and seemed to swoop suddenly down. The boy still lay on his back, but when I sat up, gasping, I glimpsed the pale disc of his face as he turned to see what had startled me. 'It's all right,' I said, though it wasn't. It is the summer of 1954. Four young men, on a summer vacation buy an old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all the way to the mountains of Spain. It is only a few years since the war, Europe is still in ruins. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamers and realists, men but not much more than boys. They have their whole lives ahead of them. This will be their summer to remember. A beautiful, elegiac rumination on youth, friendship and the dreams that we hold. "A haunting meditation on memory and loss that takes the reader on a summer road trip to a vanished Spain. In this well-crafted, wistful novella, Sam Adams weaves his tapestry from fragments of a remembered friendship in a coming of age tale written with sixty years' bitter hindsight." - Richard Gwyn Sam Adams has created a rare novel in The Road to Zarauz, both timeless and very much of a time and a place, a past of hope and expectation erased in a moment, and what remains when hope is gone.
Told in a flashback to 1954, The Road to Zarauz is a classic road-trip novel told from the perspective of a present-day grandfather. The trip in question takes our narrator from south Wales to Franco’s Spain with three of his friends. For most of the party, the chance to see mainland Europe is supposed to be a thrilling lifetime highlight, while for one of them the trip provides a chance to revisit sites once visited during the Second World War as a serving soldier. Sam Adams’s new novel is a tale that both celebrates youth and makes the reader reflect on life, age and aging. It’s excellent. Adams’s story takes place in a sunlit moment in time, but it’s clear from the start that this is wedged in the shade of memory. On one side is the shadow of what went before, and on the other the narrator’s hindsight casts looming shade from what’s to come. We know that this is not going to be an entirely happy tale from the off, but it’s never too clear what is casting such shade from up ahead. Adams skilfully creates tension, but avoids over-egging the dramatic pudding. Set within the same post-war period as Kerouac’s classic of the genre, On the Road, there’s a lot to tie the two road-trip novels together in comparison. Both contain young men with a passion for new experiences – men who are loaded with existential questions and a passion for words and poetry. However, Adams’s novel feels more seriously influenced by what’s gone before: namely the Second World War. Kerouac’s novel, like much Beat writing, is the product of a post-war crisis of youth and masculinity, yet the war is far more distant and abstract in its presence. In The Road to Zarauz, the presence of war is very much one of the main players. We travel through countries still very much affected by it, and one of the main characters is always on hand to relay first-hand knowledge and experience of life as a soldier. History is ever present and not always kept so neatly in the past. Adams does well to avoid the rose-tinted nostalgia that is easy to slip into when the fully grown write of youth. He creates a story that reflects real memory and characters that are fully rounded. We hear relatively little about each, but the details given provide all that we need. Their friendships are portrayed with the faults and nuances that friendships carry: the caveats and weird dynamics of people who are close, but not set to be life-long friends. The relationships and dialogue between the four give a realism that heightens the impact when it’s clear what’s happened. The Road to Zarauz is at once a timeless road-trip novel with all the classic hallmarks of the genre, and also something entirely unique. It’s a wonderful short novel that dances between personal and world histories, and the power and frailty of memory. Like all good road trips, the memory of this journey will linger for a long time. -- Liam Nolan @ www.gwales.com
ISBN: 9781912681853
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
120 pages