BOOK REVIEW LIME OLIVE TREES Author: Fran Toro From the reader report by: Antônio Roberto Esteves Olivos de cal is the award-winning debut novel by Fran Toro Gutiérrez, a historian who has decided to dedicate himself to writing. Woven on the threshold of oral accounts from the region of his ancestors, the story seeks to portray the harsh life of a family in the first half of the 20th century in the olive groves of Sierra Sur, on the edge of Jaén province. At the heart of the accounts is the story of a strong woman and her troubled relations with the land lords. The protagonist of the novel, rather than the local peasants who struggle to survive by cultivating their olive groves, grazing their animals, trying to make a living from those stony fields, suffering the oppression of the landowners and their taskmasters, is actually the land itself, dry and hostile, as it often does in this type of novel. Despite the struggle between the gangs involved in the Civil War, given the vicissitudes of the battles in the region, Olivos de cal cannot be considered a novel of the War. In it the conflict that figures in part of the narrative arises as a consequence of century-old and unsolved agrarian and social problems of the region. These problems were latent during the Republic times, in the war period and afterwards, when the Franco dictatorship violently suffocated the guerrilla nucleus active in the area. Despite the persistent dialogue with harsh reality and historical facts, it is a fully fictional narrative. The action, however, is located in a geographic site that can be located, and is identified with its own names. In this way, the novel, alternating real and fictional threads, produces an intricate portrait that hides, behind the breathtaking landscapes of Jaén’s olive groves, harsh and suffering scenes from the history of a little-remembered part of this deep Andalusia that is almost always reproduced in a stereotypical and folkloric way.
PUBLISHED IN NEW SPANISH BOOKS BR | FR
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