Metamorphosis of Earth

One Million Cows puts together eighteen stories by Manuel Rivas, one of the best known and translated author from Spain writing in Galician. These stories, narration ranging from personal accounts to magic like encounters are often short but well crafted.

In the opening story First Love a man meets his former love who wants to go on a foreign trip. My Cousin, The Gigantic Robot is recounted by a small boy who thinks his cousin Dombodan, who rarely speaks, is a robot. The character Dambodan appears in one another story One Of Those Guys Who Come From Far Away when he's offended in a hangout and finally speaks. In Solitary Sailor, after a heavy storm, a humble living dead shipwrecked sailor appears in a bar for a beer. A man is haunted with fish-attack who's on board with five Irishmen in A Match With The Irishman. A suicide is taken far-off for a Christian burial led by an old man in The Lame Horse's Road. In The Englishman a young man after his return from England turns his home into a luxury town with a golf course. Other stories include A father whose love of peace is in danger; A son who receives an unexpected letter from home; An electoral candidate talks about his encounter with a woman who has fish scales; An old woman in conversation with her unlikely driver; A jazz band who's nothing good to play to appease the audience; University teacher who's fond of a country-mill is fooled; A provincial artist who's invited to the capital Madrid where art is unstable; An imaginary friend Tom befriends a little girl; An old woman calls at the telephone exchange for his infantry son to come home; Friends meeting on Sunday talking mundane things, and A girl who has many things to say about her cows. Well, it's clear that there are stories from everywhere, for everyone—places vs places, places vs men and men vs men.

Subtle transformation is one of the key themes to all these stories. Descriptions are prudent that frame the stories, and set the perfect tone, such that we find ourselves merged with the texture of sentences which are organic to storytelling—chunks of merriment. ^1,2

1. With the car going at a man's pace, I realized how much the track revealed its entrails of gravel and mud. In the delayed panorama, the eyes followed the line of electric's fences, drawn from time to time, in the ditch, to the rusty remains of domestic appliances or, on the horizon, to scraggy, discoloured scarecrows and cows that looked as if they'd been waiting for that moment for centuries. 

2. In its reckless convulsion, the sea vomited on the sand a frontier of remains, the sticky enchantment of seaweed, stateless sea urchins, evicted crustaceans and other things, a fairground of strange bodies, vessels with saltpeter and resin calligrams, errant mandibles, logs with wild animals, frayed ropes, machines with rusted teeth, single shoes and skeleton of a watch.

Without being outspoken, the well placed context of modernity in rise, and personal longings in loss, stories successfully place mockery and create casual fun or craft sadness palpable to ordinary beings. The characters confront the world working in anomalous ways and find themselves separated and alone, not necessarily saddened but at odds with being mere observer.³ 

3.    'There is in Spain,' declared the critic Bernabé Candela, 'nature and metaphysics, passion and biology, reflection and outbursts, and it is well known there is no beauty without rebellion, even if that convulsion is contained by the prudent nets of reason. Espinã may be a wonderful symbiosis, that of the monster awaiting the end of the century.'

The stories project, combining all the colours branching from conflicts or settlements, a bright picture of life in Galicia during 1980's.

Author: Manuel Rivas

Translator: Jonathan Dunne

Publisher: Small Stations Press

Page Count: 109

Price: $ 12.99