Review: El Hacho by Luis Carrasco
Firstly, it’s a beautiful book to hold and touch, and the cover image by Anna Raspopva, of a stylised olive tree, is striking. Leaves fill the top third of the front cover with no space between them for sky or birds or sun, just leaves crammed in – almost spilling off the cover; just as his olives fill all of Curro’s days – past, present, and possibly future. And those knobbly trunks, below the rectangle of leaves, are so slender, hardly strong enough to hold up the burgeoning leaves; perhaps this is showing the tenuous hold Curro and his olives have on this way of life in today’s world of climate change, our desire for technology and comfort, and developers’ seemingly unquenchable thirst for land.
This is a quiet book with power, in the same way a mountain is quiet and formidable. Set in Andalusia, El Hacho is the mountain on which Curro lives with his wife, and where he farms olives. The novel explores a relationship with the land, and how that relationship is changing, how that kind of relationship is certainly no longer inevitable and perhaps not even viable. It seems to me that farmers, certainly in my part of the UK, receive the approaches of developers with some enthusiasm. I don’t really understand why that is, unless it’s greed, but I suspect that greed is too simplistic an explanation for a tremendously difficult decision and there has to be more to it. Perhaps the cumulative effect of years of unrealistic food pricing and supermarkets expecting to buy huge amounts of food very cheaply, is that life has been made too tough, particularly when a solution in the form of a builder offering loads of money turns up on the doorstep. But hasn’t that been the case for a very long time? Perhaps, increasingly, farmers have aspirations that cannot be realised through farming. Anyway, I don’t have the answer, but these are the kinds of issues you find yourself thinking about whilst reading the novel. I must mention that Luis Carrasco’s prose is a joy to read for its control and beauty. I also enjoyed spending time in Andalusia with Curro – I really felt those horrendous thunderstorms, and I couldn’t put the book down when things began to get really tough for Curro and found myself reading well into the night. Even better, when I’d finished it, to my surprise, the book left me feeling hopeful.
In conclusion, I’m entirely glad I read this book, it’s not always you can say that, and I think Curro will stay with me.
El Hacho by Luis Carrasco is published by the lovely époque press
