Trafford Publishing: Stars Over the Desert

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Stars Over the Desert

by Francesc Estival, translated by John L. Getman

120 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-0020; ISBN 1-4120-2096-4; US$16.00, C$18.95, EUR12.50, £9.50

A Catalan villager escaping from the oppression of his culture seeks love and fulfillment with an immigrant girl. Fate forces him to confront her conservative traditional family, leading to tragedy.

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about the book about the author and translator excerpts catalogue info

About the Book

Stars Over the Desert traces the exploits of Izzy, a rather naive, innocent Catalan villager, who flees the clutches of his traditional family to discover the rest of the world in all its strangeness and vitality. He faces personal and economic hardship as he seeks jobs and fights off the loneliness of the big city.
Izzy finally finds fulfilling work as a clerk in a fruit shop run by Rocky, an aging adventurer. Rocky encourages him to find a wife, settle down and start a family for the emotional rewards that Rocky himself never enjoyed in his vagabond life. Rocky introduces Izzy to several promising lady clients, all of whom leave Izzy dizzy and confused by their hilariously outlandish ways. Here the novel becomes very funny indeed.
Finally Izzy's quest for the perfect wife focuses on Amina, an immigrant girl shrouded in mystery who walks by the shop every day. He sets out to learn more about her by stalking her every move, until he finally runs her to ground in 'The Mutes Café' in one of the shabby quarters of the city. When he enters the café he is faced with an even stranger cast of characters.
Amina's family are traditionalist immigrants from North Africa who want their daughter to marry within their own community. Izzy's attempts to get closer to her are rebuked by her family. He is forced to invent ways to be with her that border on 'magical realism'.
The conflict comes to the boil when he discovers that her family has pledged Amina in marriage against her wishes to an aged desert sheik already four times married. Izzy vows not to allow this to happen and willfully sets about forcing circumstances his way. The rest of the novel charts the hilarious and yet deeply committed actions of the hero as he fights to free his love from her hide-bound family. By forcing the issue, Izzy inevitably leads his love to a tragic end.

About the Author and Translator

Francesc Estival, author:
Day by day he fritters away his vital juices as a government bureaucrat, which brings little light to his life. For a Spaniard raised on the Mediterranean, lack of light is slow death. The author escapes this dire reality by writing fiction. He builds his stories around the Mediterranean sea, its civilizations, its lights and its lies. The final result is always the same: a civilized Mediterranean lie, guaranteed to keep the reader turning the pages. Stars Over the Desert is Estival's third published book.
John L. Getman, translator:
Getman was born in New York. He earned a BA in English Literature, then an MA in Spanish and Linguistics. He has taught English, Spanish, German, Catalan, French and Danish. Tired of all that grammar, he went back to the basics and studied literary translation, earning a Masters of Fine Arts. Conclusion: translation is more art than science. His books in translation from the Catalan have earned several awards. He now lives in Catalonia, near the edge of the Mediterranean, where its light, its civilization and its lies feed his fantasies. His hobbies are painting, poetry and punning.

Excerpts

The first two chapters:
SHATTERED JOY

Izzy was a twenty-seven year old youth born in Rupit, a small mountain town in the interior of Catalonia. Its steep, narrow streets have always helped defend the town from an excessive invasion of wheeled vehicles. This privileged situation has helped maintain the town's tranquillity and keep out annoying and unnecessary traffic. Things happened slowly in the sweet silence of that little mountain town. Izzy loved its pure air and birdsong.
At the time this story begins, Rupit, in spite of its small size, enjoyed a great deal of cultural activity. The moving spirits behind this were Izzy and a young married couple, Isidro and Maria. All three of them had been schoolmates and had remained close friends ever since. Isidro and Maria were the owners of the village bakery as well as fervent theater fans. The couple wanted to get Izzy involved in founding a little theater group, but they had another motive as well: they wanted to encourage Izzy out of his timidity and they thought working in the theater would be good therapy for him. But precisely because of his timidity Izzy refused to become an actor. His two friends were not put off by his refusal. They continued to insist that he would make a good actor. In an attempt to draw him out of his self-absorption, they tried to convince him that he had the attractive good looks of an actor and that he shouldn't let that go to waste. But Izzy's embarrassment was stronger than his friends' arguments to the contrary.
Izzy was a lad of medium height, stocky enough to be noticeably oafish in his movements. His chestnut hair was light and wavy, like wheat in a summer field, a lock of which hung over his large, green eyes that sparkled with their own light from within. The lad was the silent type. His silence and timidity shrouded him in an air of mystery which made him even more remarkable when he was with other people.
After much insisting on the part of Isidro and Maria, the three of them finally decided to found a theater group. At the beginning, this new enterprise surprised the townspeople and aroused their curiosity. In that small mountain community nobody had ever imagined that there lay hidden artistic talent among them. That same curiosity worked like a magnet among the youth of the town. Many of them became interested in the project, which soon led to their joining the theater group themselves. In order for the group to become a success, it was very important for Isidro and Maria to find a place where the group could rehearse. After a long search, they decided the best place would be in the back of their bakery. So from that moment on the amateur actors rehearsed in the midst of huge peasant loaves of rising bread dough.
The good intentions of Isidro and Maria, together with the growing success of the project, did not help solve Izzy's problem. When he was on stage he forgot his timidity and acted well, but when the play was over he retreated back into himself just as predictably as anyone who goes on a trip and then returns straight back home.
Even though his friends weren't successful in making him an extrovert, the amateur theater group began to grow on Izzy and became one of his major pleasures in life. His other great pleasure was the enjoyment of the sunsets in Rupit. In fact, that final moment of the day had become magical for the whole town. All the residents to a man trudged up to a lookout point at the edge of town where the view was vast, an infinite landscape that filled the eyes and conquered the hearts of all who admired it. From that privileged spot the spectators watched as the sun slowly sank below the horizon, disappearing behind the distant mountains until the next day. At that precise moment, a transparent veil of peace and serenity seemed to fall over the people gathered on that spot. They stood there, respectfully silent, bewitched by the beauty of the moment. Under the influence of that mood their souls opened, their worries disappeared and their spirits were strengthened to face the next day.
Once they had bid farewell to the evening's last dying rays of sunlight, everything seemed to change and the lookout point became something else. A ceremony began which was a sort of ritual and a competition at the same time. As if it were an open secret, each person carried a hidden bottle of ratafia. With high spirits and no worries to encumber them, everybody began to drink. The accepted excuse was that each drink helped them fight off the evening chill, but the truth was that each and every one of them thought their own homemade ratafia was the very best and bragged about it to all the rest.
Ratafia is an aromatic home-brewed liqueur made with several different kinds of fruits and herbs. Each family in town made its own, according to its own recipe and of course they always claimed theirs was the best. Everyone knew that a glass of ratafia helped fight off the evening chill and a second glass made folks quite jolly. A third glass was usually the last one anyone was able to remember. So from then on their eyes became blurred slits and everyone slept much better.
In order to prove to their neighbors that their ratafia was the best, folks invited each other to try a sip from each of their bottles. So the sunset sippings sometimes got a bit too exuberant, each taster bragging about his own brew and criticizing his neighbor's. Little by little noses and tempers flared redder and redder. Izzy was no different from the rest of the townspeople in that respect. He always brought his own brew, the pride of his family. The recipe for his liqueur was so old that his grandfather's great-grandfather had made it the same way. Izzy still made it according to that ancient recipe, just as his ancestors had done. He carefully guarded the recipe behind a tile in the kitchen and revealed it to no one.
The lad lived immersed in those small pleasures which gave him the greatest satisfaction. Surrounded by such affability, it had never occurred to him to leave his home town or travel. He had no idea how big the larger world beyond his world was. Until one day his world came tumbling down around him and he was forced to leave his beloved town against his will.
Izzy's timidity was especially noticeable when he was in the company of young ladies. In his twenty-seventh year he had not yet considered the question of marriage. Nor was there any visible sign that he had even thought about it. That set his family to worrying. In order to remedy the problem, the family got together without Izzy's knowledge and decided that they had to find him a girlfriend, with the malicious intent of getting him married. After a brief search the family came up with their choice: Mariona Bages from the house of Saberut. She was thirty-two years old.
As was the custom in town, the house of Saberut was given that name precisely because the family thought they knew everything about everything. Saberut meant know-it-all. They thought they were always riding the crest of the newest wave in culture, art, politics and whatever else that would help spread their fame as first class people of the avant-garde. The parents were convinced their daughter Mariona knew it all and was liberal and liberated to boot.
Mariona lived in permanent contradiction with her image as a free-thinking liberal. Thus in order to reaffirm her position to herself and to anyone else who might be watching, she demolished all the socially acceptable barriers to good behavior. The first barrier to fall was that of the flesh. As a consequence, she created her own self-image, probably the one she wanted others to see. So it was no secret that she had toyed with all the boys in town as well as those in the surrounding countryside. Her fame had spread far beyond the county. She was known as a "modern woman," open and deep to the point where she would give it away to the first man in sight.
Izzy was shaken when he learned of his family's plans for him. He didn't think he would be able to put up with that shrewish fleshpot for the rest of his life, so he asked his family very seriously to leave him alone so he could keep his head sharp and free. But his family had their own ideas about that. They had chosen this specific woman for two reasons: first, to get Izzy married off and settled down. Second, because they believed as did the rest of the town that the Saberuts were first-class people and that if they could marry into that family, they too would somehow become first-class people. Izzy's ambitious family wasn't at all worried about sacrificing their son by marrying him off to the rather floozy Mariona as long as by doing so they themselves managed to rise in social status.
Izzy didn't give it a second thought. He firmly declared that he wasn't interested in her. His family countered all his protests with force and conviction. They all ganged up on him and relentlessly hammered their idea home until poor Izzy, who had considered himself a happy man before all this, could take no more of their pressure. He anguished over their plans for his future to the point where he made a transcendental decision: against his will and his future happiness, he decided his only way out was to escape from his beloved Rupit. So he packed a suitcase and walked out the front door of his house just like someone going for a walk, but toting a suitcase. Before leaving town, he stopped to say goodbye to his friends Isidro and Maria.
"I'm not coming back until I find the woman of my dreams and that's a problem I have to settle all by myself," he told them.
After saying goodbye Izzy left town, his happiness riven with a crack from top to bottom. And thus began his introduction to the wide, wide world around him.
THE FUGITIVE WHO COULDN'T ESCAPE

During the first few days of his flight Izzy felt very insecure. He longed for everything he had left behind, so he didn't dare get too far away from town. His first attempt at escape turned into a simple stroll around the county. When his family discovered him missing they broadcast to all and sundry orders to bring the fugitive back alive. From that point on, all eyes were on the lookout for Izzy until he was tracked down and brought back with his tail between his legs.
After the first escape attempt, there were several more. Each time he would run a little farther away, each time disguising himself so that nobody could easily recognize him. But he was easy to recognize, because he was one of the actors from the Rupit theater group. So there was always someone willing to do the family a favor and turn the lad in. Wherever he went, his family was not far behind. The whole clan surrounded him and attacked him in unison. And since they always got what they wanted, they easily managed to convince him to return home again. Every time his family got him back home, he started planning his next escape. Each time he left he would say goodbye to his friends all over again. Isidro and Maria were getting tired of saying goodbye and wishing him well so often. The rest of the town made fun of Izzy's serial attempts at escape. So in order to bring this strange situation to an end, Isidro and Maria managed to convince Izzy that he couldn't continue playing this ridiculous boomerang game. They made him understand that it was impossible to run away from home by staying so near to home. They urged him to run a good deal farther away, where nobody from town could find him.
Armed with such good advice from his friends, Izzy decided he would have to take that big step which would definitively sever himself from his happiness. With firm determination he planned out the greatest escape yet: he would go to far-off Barcelona. But once he arrived in Barcelona, the first thing he felt was loneliness, then dizziness, then pain all over and finally defeat, all in that order.
The difference between Rupit and the big city was that there nobody said hello to him, nobody smiled at him, nobody spoke a word to him. So there he was, surrounded by people but lost and alone in the crowd. In order to fight his way out of his solitude he started saying hello to everybody who passed by. He shook their hands and tried to engage them in conversation for a while until the police arrested him as a public nuisance. The police held him in jail for a few days while they gave him a battery of psychological tests. After a week they let him go without any explanation and no cure for his solitude either.
In busy Barcelona everything was always in constant motion. The big city noises never stopped, growing louder and louder until he felt his head was about to explode. In order to quash those horrible noises tormenting him, he tried to find a place where he could listen to the birds sing, but nobody seemed to know of such a place in Barcelona. There came a time when poor Izzy was so exhausted that he couldn't even sleep at night. His eyes began to ache from all the constant movement around him and his dizziness grew worse. To make things even more unbearable, he was unable to find work. He felt he was poorly treated, people were not at all friendly, the food was artificial and not at all what he was used to, plus a whole series of other irritants he couldn't remember. But he persevered and tried to overcome his pain because he had a mission. And that's the way things remained until his money ran out. Then he realized the moment of truth had come: he had to give up. So after he gave up he decided the best thing to do was to return home, but he didn't have the price of a ticket to Rupit. After rummaging around in his pockets he found enough coins to buy a ticket to Granollers, from where he figured he could continue on foot the rest of the way.
When he stepped off the train in Granollers he discovered that this city wasn't as noisy as Barcelona and that there were still some quiet places where he could hear the birds sing. Since these circumstances were more to his liking, he decided to stay on and try his luck. Granollers is a mid-sized city and not so far away from the enchanting sunsets of Rupit. But it was still another county away from home.
At that midpoint in his journey, Izzy started looking for work. His intuition proved him right, because in a few days he found work as a hod carrier for a brick mason. It was a rush job that was behind schedule, so he worked every day, weekends included. The job lasted for two months and when the construction was finished, the boss laid everybody off without pity or exception. Izzy's only consolation was that he had folding money in his pocket again. As for the rest, when he lost his job that old feeling of helplessness returned. And the feeling persisted, planted deep down inside him like a seed in the earth.
In spite of this setback, he found another job almost immediately as a stock clerk in a supermarket that was in the process of becoming a huge chain store. Truth was, it was just a store owned by a family with more smoke than fire, the Magins. They had a son, Jofre, who had just graduated from the university in economics, which was more than obvious the moment he opened his mouth. And if you didn't notice, the family would butt in and remind you. So Jofre set about creating a marketing strategy designed to expand the family business. And Izzy occupied a privileged position within the framework of that strategy.
However, as time went on the customer base did not grow as fast as Jofre's plan had projected and that made the frustrated economist hopping mad. As a result of this disappointment, Jofre re-designed the marketing strategy and expansion plans for the family business. He devised a brilliant idea for reducing costs: lay off personnel. His core idea grew and grew until he had it in its final form, a 253 page written report, a copy of which he gave to Izzy with orders to read it. The importance of this little exercise was that Izzy, their only non-family employee, learned of his own dismissal when he read the report. Though he couldn't understand much of the report, its message struck him square in the face as he stood on the street corner, forlornly staring at his last paycheck.
The other jobs he was able to find lasted an equally short time and his sense of helplessness rose and sank like a roller coaster. His longing for the things he missed from home grew as his jobs came and went. After one particularly long day of fruitless searching for a new job, his sense of futility overcame his reserves of morale and the whole world seemed to come crashing down around him. That was the day he decided he'd better go back home again. He made tracks for the train station. But what Izzy didn't know was that he would never get there.
As he was walking by a fruit shop, the brilliant colors of the many varied fruits attracted his attention. They seemed to speak to him, draw him to them all by themselves. They reminded him of the orchards at home. Since he was hungry he went in to buy some fruit. He never did get to the station that day, because that little shop became his next job. The shop was owned by an old man named Rocky who had become too feeble to run his business all by himself anymore. He needed help. Rocky was one of those fellows who had lived his whole life like a bell clapper, swinging from one place to another around the world, accompanied solely by his bicycle and his pup tent. He had spent the greater part of his life wandering about with the idea of packing the greatest number of adventures he could fit into the years he had left to him. But finally, overcome by exhaustion, he decided he needed to settle down somewhere and that somewhere became Granollers. And that's where he set up his fruit shop. From that point on, his life was his fruit and his clients.
But as time went on, Rocky realized that while he had been searching for an imaginary heaven of sorts, he had lost sight of the basics, the bare earth on which he stood. He came to feel the lack of close human contact and warmth, the security of a family. As he grew older his strength began to wane and a deep chill overcame him. He always felt cold. In recent years he had developed a hump in his spine which was by now chronic and more and more noticeable as he trundled among his boxes of fruit, bent over like a hunchback. In spite of his difficulties Rocky the valiant adventurer kept on, determined to survive. At this juncture Rocky probably needed Izzy more than Izzy needed Rocky. Truth was they needed each other. They came to depend on each other. From that mutual need a congenial relationship developed as they unselfishly helped each other. As they got to know one another better, Rocky was able to identify with Izzy's goals to the extent that they seemed to be his own. He passionately supported Izzy in his search for the girl of his heart's desire so that Izzy would never come to feel the cold as Rocky did in his old age. As he worked beside Rocky, Izzy felt he was in good company and had found a friend for the first time since he left Rupit.

Catalogue Information