Anxo Angueira
Biography
Anxo Angueira lectures in Galician literature at the University of Vigo. He has written four books of fiction, the most famous of which is Listing Ship, winner of the Xerais Prize for novels, about the tensions in a Galician village in the build-up to the Spanish Civil War. He is also the author of several poetry collections and essays on the history of Galician literature, in particular the Galician Revival of the second half of the nineteenth century. He is president of the Rosalía de Castro Foundation in Padrón and has produced Galician editions of both this poet’s major Galician works, Galician Songs and New Leaves, for the publishing house Edicións Xerais. He is very linked to this part of Galicia, just south of Santiago de Compostela, on the banks of the river Sar, having been born nearby and lived there all his life.
Photograph © Eduardo Rivo
LISTING SHIP synopsis
Listing Ship (192 pages) is a novel about the simmering tensions in a Galician village before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. It is also a novel about the possibilities of modernism, progress, in a rural setting, the opportunity for different forces to come together in search of the common good. The novel is set in Sernanselle, a village to the southwest of Santiago de Compostela, in the Arousa estuary, based on the village where the author himself grew up.
LISTING SHIP
PART I
Sernanselle, November 24, 1935.
My Dear Son Ramón:
I hope with all my heart that you are in good health. For the moment we are all doing well.
You probably know that Xacobe de Dominga over beside the hay barn by the Outeiriño lot put in four posts to make a grape arbor, cutting off the front side of our place, so that very day I got three men along with your uncle Rosende and I suggested that he should clear away our front side. So that’s what he did and we put in four posts of our own, and so the front side of our place stayed clear.
“María, is the oven hot enough yet?”
“It’s not hot yet, mother. Not yet. But it doesn’t need any more fire. The green toxo, the gorse that was brought from Valranco, is enough. Now let it burn down until the coals are ready.”
“We have a lot to bake.”
“That doesn’t matter. Listen to me and keep going, because I’m in even more of a hurry. I want to finish by the time Rosende’s order is ready and take the letter to Cancela da Maceira.”
The woman has placed the enormous portion of dough she’s kneaded for two empanadas and the bread on the wooden kneading board that rests atop the flour bin. Using a spoon made from boxwood, she spreads out a layer and fits it into the bottom of an empanada pan. While she’s dictating the letter to María, she takes the frying pan from the hearth and spreads the zaragallada – a mixture of fried garlic, onion, parsley and other ingredients that is now a beautiful golden color – on top of the bottom layer with the same spoon, made from boxwood. It’s a generous combination of onion and pepper with a precious pinch of saffron. She extends a generous amount of tranchos, sardines, on top of the mixture, sardines from the wide xeito nets, that Micaela de Rianxo had brought at dusk. On top of the sardines, another layer of dough. Then skilled hands seal it around the edges of the pan, although not with a fluted ridge, because the fluting is for the empanadas made from wheat flour.
