The Bitter Taste of Time

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish at Laurentian
University.

The Bitter Taste of Time begins with the end. It is 1997; the Encarna
and Hope Hotel in Canteira, Spain, is being demolished to make way for a
park in memory of Artur, who died when the terrorist bomb he was to
plant exploded an hour too soon. Artur’s father was a bigamist whom he
never knew. His grandfather, presumed dead in South America, comes back
to life—and back to Canteira—with his Brazilian paramour and her
mother (who puts out Artur’s grandmother’s left eye with a silver
candelabra). Long before any of this, Artur’s great-grandfather hanged
himself in the kitchen, next to the hams and strings of garlic.

The women in the family endure all this and more. Unrequited love,
illness, rape, and even murder come their way in this intricate and
compelling novel. Together, these women become the central character of
the novel, the “big lump of Encarna women” whom Gloria (Artur’s
mother) describes as “the cooking odours of Cecilia, rolled into the
religious fervour of Carmen, blessed and embellished by Matilde’s
imaginative stories and framed by two unfathomable bookends—her
grandmother, who rarely smiled, rarely emerged from her state of black,
and of course, her mam, floating atop them all like a distant,
unanswered question.” The lives of the Encarnas unravel with drama and
passion in a novel that is by turns hilarious and tragic, incredible and
unutterably ordinary.