Author Cynthia Menéndez talks with Martín Veiga and Keith Payne about her recent book Son coma glaciares os barcos de aceiro. A proletarian ode to a bygone Vigo, the industrial heart of Galicia, Menéndez’s tour-de-force debut, (steel glaciers), fictionalizes the 1997 campaign against privatization by the city’s shipyard workers. In a fragmented yet cohesive narrative that calls to mind the intimacy of camcorder home movies, the vignettes are narrated by one of the workers’ sons, Pedro, who invests his memories of youth with the epic sweep of myth and the joyous melancholy of a necessary struggle doomed to failure. Poignant and frenetic, with a remarkably assured voice and a keen eye for the minute details that bring people and place to life, Steel Glaciers is the work of a major new talent in Galician literature.
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- Irish Centre for Galician Studies. University College Cork