Here are the memories of an Englishman about his prolonged stay in La Alpujarra, between Granada and Almería. Gerald Brenan first settled there in the 1920s. Later he changed towns and also provinces. He continued to live there in the 30s, 40s and even in the 50s, although at intervals, of course, mainly due to the civil war, which would mark his stay at all times. He came to acquire an education, which the books he carried, mainly Greek and Latin classics, should provide him. So, reading, writing, thinking, those were his purposes. But he found one more: understanding those around him. Which determined an unexpected conclusion: knowing yourself more, but above all better. He sought to read, yes, but also the primitive, whether he found it, because he also sought to escape from everything he had learned, from the rigid Victorian environment that he left behind, in his native England, even though he also came from a childhood in India and South Africa. , after a birth in Malta.
“Sometimes, it is the anthropological approach that first resonates and then emerges, with all the inventiveness that is inherent to it, the second“
Nothing in these places was as exotic, attractive and suggestive as what he found in La Alpujarra.. There she integrated among the people without losing even an iota of her original look. These memories are the result of that magical crossing. There is, of course, no arrogance in them, as often happens in narrators with the same background, educated in the environments of the most refined civilization. Nor paternalistic fascination. The descriptions of him, often between hallucination and taxonomy, emerge in the light of a revealing intersection between literature and anthropology, in fact as if this were a branch of the first. His narratives result from the transition from the first to the second. Or vice versa. Sometimes, it is the anthropological approach that resonates first and then the second emerges, with all the inventiveness that is inherent to it. But inventiveness to understand, to illuminate the areas that the new science does not reach, in no case to mystify.
“The journey is or should be the attempt to understand, and that purpose is what actually structures each of these stories.“
It is, therefore, theirs, a journey that never ends, even though it may be located within the rigid margins of the aforementioned temporal space. It’s a journey that begins every morning even though he barely moves. It is the journey from one culture to the other, which, as the curious traveler knows, never ends.. The journey is or should be the attempt to understand, and that purpose is what actually underpins each of these stories. Even those focused on the visits of the Bloombsbury group, which allow them to travel to their own culture from their still imperceptible, recently acquired status as an Alpujarreño.
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Author: Gerald Brenan. TYotulo: South of Granada. Editorial: Tusquets. Sale: All your books.
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