{"id":14229,"date":"2020-02-10T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-10T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pocolit.uber.space\/?p=14229"},"modified":"2020-04-28T09:40:41","modified_gmt":"2020-04-28T07:40:41","slug":"archipelago-by-inger-maria-mahlke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2020\/02\/10\/archipelago-by-inger-maria-mahlke\/","title":{"rendered":"Archipelago"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Inger-Maria\nMahlke’s award-winning novel Archipelago<\/em>\nis set in Tenerife. It tells the story of the island as experienced by several\nfamilies in reverse chronological order, from 2015 to 1919. Through an\nelliptical and small-scale narrative style that demands a great deal of\nattention from its readers, Mahlke illustrates the special role played by the\nvolcanic Canary Islands in 20th century European history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The geographical\nsetting off the north-west coast of Africa, far from the European continent,\nmakes Tenerife a unique location for European power games to play out. On the\nother hand, Tenerife is so far away that continental Europeans sometimes forget\nit. News from the European mainland and the Spanish centre of power in Madrid\noften arrive belatedly. Today, once more, Tenerife appears as an island off the\nbeaten track, where everything must be wrested from nature. Mahlke uses this\nambivalent setting between beauty and roughness, between relevance and\ninsignificance, to great effect in her novel. Refracting her narrative through\nthree Spanish families of different social classes, as well as British\nmerchants, Mahlke offers snippet-like, multi-layered insights into possible\nisland-destinies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book takes us,\nchapter by chapter, further into the past, from the year 2015 to New Year’s Eve\n1919, when the past future begins. It was on this New Year’s Eve that Julio\nBaute, el portero<\/em>, was born. But\nJulio was not always the doorman of the La Laguna retirement home. Privilege\nhas never characterised his own experience of the world; he has only observed\nit in others. His father suffered the loss of his pharmacy and his son under\nthe Franco regime, as Julio’s older brother remained missing after being\nimprisoned. Julio himself was a courier in the civil war and a prisoner of the\nfascists. He fled and then returned to the island. By marrying Bernarda, he\nbecomes the owner of an electronics shop. The Bautes come to represent the\nmiddle class that supported the socialists. As a grumpy old man of over 90 who\nlooks back on the 20th century, Julio does not understand his daughter Ana –\nhow could she marry a Bernadotte and become a member of the conservative party?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The aristocratic,\nupper-class Bernadottes have a history of involvement with colonialism and were\namong the founders of the Falange, the right-wing party that was later\ndisempowered by Franco. The disparate families of the Bernadottes and Bautes\nare joined together when Felipe Bernadotte and Ana Baute marry. The book begins\nin 2015 with their daughter Rosa. Felipe Bernadotte distances himself from his\nfather Eliseo Bernadotte, whom he calls the last conquistador. Eliseo\nBernadotte was, among other things, responsible for transporting weapons to the\nSpanish-Sahara. Eliseo’s father-in-law, Lorenzo Gonz\u00e1lez, was an early\nFalangist and became successful as the owner of a newspaper loyal to the party.\nAll important decisions are made at his meetings with other powerful men at the\nCaf\u00e9 Atlantico. As the youngest of this line of influential men, Felipe rebels\nagainst their nationalist political attitudes, but enjoys the financial\nsecurity that they bring, especially after he experiences setbacks in his\nacademic career. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bernadottes\nhave had women of the Morales family working for them as cleaners for several\ngenerations. The women are on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. They are\noutcasts, and isolated. Socially insignificant as they are, their story also\ntakes up the least space in the novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, the novel\nshows the development of the Canary Islands from a British colony without a\nflag, to a strategically important base for the fascists, to a tourist\nstronghold. In the early 20th century, families from the British Isles\nexercised extensive power in Tenerife, mainly because they controlled the\nsupply of fresh water from the mountains. They farmed the dry island and their\ntrading houses for the export of tobacco, bananas and tomatoes were extremely\nsuccessful. Before fascism, the Canary Islands were part of the British Empire,\ndespite their belonging to Spain: Canary Wharf in London was built especially\nto accomodate this trade.  Sidney\nFellows, one of the successful British traders describes Tenerife as “…a\nhuge international crossroads where several sea routes converge …. Like a stagecoach station, only for ships” (270).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you read Archipelago<\/em>, the retrospective\nclarification given by each chapter allows you to better understand the present\nmoment. On the one hand, Mahlke describes characters, family constellations and\natmospheres in great detail, but on the other hand, some gaps do remain. The\nleaps through history do not always follow a clear logic – they leave room for\nimagining that the past and the future could always have looked quite\ndifferent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

German Book Prize-winning author Inger-Maria Mahlke’s Archipel is a multi-generational epic set on Tenerife.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14210,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[112,46,111],"class_list":["post-14229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-archipelago","tag-inger-maria-mahlke","tag-tenerife"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14229"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14681,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14229\/revisions\/14681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}