Marta del Riego Anta gives us high literature in this splendid, daring and courageous story of strong women

"Pájaro del noroeste", the return to the countryside with all its thorns

photo_camera PHOTO/Vincenzo Penteriani - Book by Marta del Riego Anta

The writer Juan Pedro Aparicio quite rightly points out that, in general, when a journalist enters the field of novels, his reference point is the "bestseller". Marta del Riego Anta, who is from La Bañeza, is a bestseller, but reading her work shows that she is a great writer, and that her point of reference is therefore high literature. 

"Pájaro del noroeste" (AdN Alianza de Novelas, 557 pages) is a novel that could be described as dazzling, impossible to create if one has not experienced first-hand the environments in which it is set. The synthesis is similar to other stories so often told: those of a person, in this case a woman, Icia, who returns to the village she left as a child, after not having achieved the success she hoped for in the big city. This return is the comeback to a world longed for to the point of mythification, but which is discovered to be much more cruel, and above all different, in its very landscape, in the people and, of course, in oneself. 

In this specific case, Icia is a person of her time, a true 21st century woman, independent, free and who, as happens to the vast majority of men, and now to more than a few women, puts her professional career before her own personal development. For the sake of work, she postpones motherhood and is already in her forties when she receives the blow of her life: the company to which she has dedicated the best of her life fires her without the slightest consideration when she is no longer useful to it.

Marta del Riego Anta

So she returns to the lost paradise, to what she had always believed to be her permanent safety net, longed for and imagined to be immobile in time. What she finds, in a village in what has come to be called Empty Spain, is not exactly idyllic. Marta del Riego is not at all interested in the possible neo-rural perspective, in which, after many misfortunes, she finds peace and relaxation in the countryside. But, she clarifies, "I don't intend to prove anything, if anything, that the life Icia builds for herself in the countryside, despite its harshness, is much more authentic than the one she left behind". 

Through her eyes, through her sensitivity, she offers a very rich vision, full of unusual nuances, encompassing the sensations of all the senses. There is a lot of smell in the novel, the atmosphere of nature, the sounds, the perception of the earth, the mud, the vineyards, the Prieto Picudo, which is as if the earth itself were speaking. "Prieto Picudo is a very brave grape, not at all feminine. It is not easy to understand. It's like the flower of the cactus, very beautiful but with many spikes," she says, describing the vineyards that grew stoutly in the middle of the rocky areas and so often provided the counterpoint to the tasty, singular and meagre cuisine of the Leonese wasteland. 

Presentación de Marta del Riego
Several books within the novel

The protagonist, faced with the sombre drama of her family, becomes involved at the same time in a violent and sexual relationship with a winegrower. Passions resurfacing from an old time to the present. The once buoyant wine industry of La Bañeza, then languishing, and now resurgent thanks to the rescue of almost centenary vines, with pre-phylloxera varieties that were thought to be extinct. A lesson in language and the heartbeat of the land, so much so that it could also be a novel of vineyards or of business (almost Californian), as Juan Pedro Aparicio himself said at the presentation of the book at the Casa de León in Madrid.

Marta del Riego Anta

The author, who has lived several years in London and Berlin, and of course in Madrid, oozes Leonism, and rebels against the current situation in the Old Kingdom: "I am hurt by the contempt for our culture and our landscape. There is the madness of building wind farms, destroying one of our greatest assets, which is nature. Because the product of this energy, let's not fool ourselves, will not stay in León. First it was the reservoirs and now the windmills...".

From this love of the land, she is not shy about describing the "hidden cruelty" in the relations of power and male-female domination. And using her characters to describe the indolence: "Nobody believes in my project. Nor in any other, not even in their own. This is a town of disbelievers. Here people are not enthusiastic about anything". Or also this devastating description of the old capital of the Kingdom: "That beautiful and superb city, with more past than future, oh, yes, a millenary past of kings and parliaments, and the first Cortes of the world in 1188, oh, yes, and the king who founded the University of Salamanca, Alfonso I don't know the number of the king, oh, oh, oh, and all those landmarks and remains and walls; a city with a present of civil servants and writers, a self-absorbed city against the backdrop of the mountains...".

After "Sendero de frío y amor" (Suma, 2013) and "Mi nombre es Sena" (Harper Collins, 2016) and "Berlin" (Tintablanca, 2019), Marta del Riego Anta reaches in "Pájaro del noroeste" an important literary peak, surely a prelude to other works of a density and depth that are already part of her personal stamp.

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