Mapped
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
The dusty plain of La Mancha, its inns and windmills, and the long road east that finally reaches Barcelona. Cervantes maps his knight onto real ground: the Campo de Montiel he sets out across, the windmills traditionally those of Campo de Criptana, El Toboso where Dulcinea is supposed to live, the Sierra Morena where he does penance, and the Barcelona beach where he is beaten. The places are real; the giants are windmills.
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The House of Ulloa
Emilia Pardo Bazán
A mild young priest, Julián, comes to serve at the decaying manor of Ulloa in the wild Galician countryside, and finds it ruled by the brutish young marquis Don Pedro, his cunning majordomo Primitivo, and the coarse life of the estate. Pardo Bazán's naturalist masterpiece maps a real rural Galicia: the crumbling pazo among the hills, the surrounding hunting country, the city of Santiago de Compostela where Don Pedro takes a gentle wife, and the villages run by the caciques who really hold power.
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The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Zafón's Barcelona of the postwar 1940s: a fog-bound old town of narrow lanes and antiquarian bookshops, from a hidden library in the Raval and a family shop off La Rambla out to the ruined modernista mansions above the city and the cemetery on Montjuïc.
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The Time of the Doves
Mercè Rodoreda
Natàlia, a working-class woman known as Colometa, tells the story of her life in the Gràcia district of Barcelona, her marriage to the domineering Quimet and his obsession with doves, and the Spanish Civil War that shatters her small world. Rodoreda maps the real neighbourhood: the Plaça del Diamant where Natàlia meets Quimet at a dance, the Gràcia streets and the flat overrun by his doves, the district under the bombs and hunger of the war, and the square she returns to at the end.
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The Yellow Rain
Julio Llamazares
Andrés, the last living inhabitant of Ainielle, a real village high in the Aragonese Pyrenees abandoned by everyone else, keeps a final vigil alone among the ruins with his memories and his dead. Llamazares maps the dying village exactly: Andrés's house, the empty homes of the departed, the silent mill and fields, the cemetery he tends, and the mountain path down to the next village that he can no longer bring himself to take, as the yellow rain of falling poplar leaves buries it all.
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