A tragic tale of hatred between two half-brothers, Celebration in the Northwest (Fiesta al Noroeste) is a gripping novel by Ana María Matute, one of twentieth-century Spain’s most important writers.

 

At the center of the novel are confessions that the protagonist, Juan Medinao, makes to a local priest in the fictional Castilian town of Artámila. Those confessions reveal the volatile mixture of attraction and repulsion between Juan and his half-brother, Pablo. In describing the troubled bond between these characters, Matute creates a harrowing, modern enactment of the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel. Celebration in the Northwest is remarkable for its evocative prose, its riveting plot, and its portrayal of a character overcome by bitterness, envy, rage, and alienation.

Ana María Matute was born in Barcelona in 1926 and has published ten novels, ten collections of short stories and essays, and eight children’s books. She has won nearly all of Spain’s major literary prizes—among them, the prestigious Café Gijón award for Celebration—and her works have been translated into twenty-three different languages. In 2010, Matute won the Cervantes Prize for lifetime achievement.

 

Phoebe Ann Porter is coeditor, with Héctor Medina, of Exploraciones imaginativas: Quince cuentos hispano-americanos.

“Truly merciless fiction . . . The ‘Northwest’ of the title is not a geographical region but the name of a cemetery, and the celebration is of death—most notably the death that results when a circus wagon runs over a small boy. The protagonist, Juan Medinao, is a sad provincial landowner. . . . Juan’s half brother Pablo . . . acts as Abel to Juan’s Cain, though fratricide does not quite come to pass. . . . The portrait of the tortured Juan is utterly convincing in Phoebe Ann Porter’s fine translation, which somehow manages to preserve the shattering darkness of the original.”—New York Times Book Review