The republic of dreams

the long version

Here is another multigenerational Latin American saga, this time about immigrants from Spanish Galicia to Brazil. Paterfamilias Madruga has made good, acquiring showy objects of wealth as fast as he amasses his fortune. Now that his wife Eulalia is dying, he takes stock of the family they have produced and finds them amorphous, spineless creatures who leave him cold--except for granddaughter Breta, who accompanies him on a trip back to Spain and who agrees to write a book about the family's ordeal of emigration. In their transplantation from lush and green Galicia to the desolate urban shores of Brazil, something vital has been lost, and a deep longing for the past and for the Old World permeates the book. The writing itself is characterized by the use of elliptical sentences, otherwise called fragments. For Latin American enthusiasts. --Jack Shreve, Library Journal.