Author and lawyer Nicolas Kyriakou has read, highlighted, and recommends *The Peninsula with the Empty Houses*
Last summer, I “confronted” David Oukles’s book. I say “confronted” because for years I had grown accustomed to the short form. The Spanish author’s book, however, runs to 820 pages—a length that, by my standards, rivals the third-semester administrative law textbook (those in the know, know).
From Kypseli to Mystras, Monemvasia, Mani, Gythio, Kalamata, Pylos, and finally Hydra, I was a faithful daily reader, sometimes reading dozens of pages, other times just a few. The book follows a large, multi-generational family in the Spanish countryside, on the eve of and throughout the Civil War. It is a multifaceted narrative, alternating between characters, voices, and adventures. Historical figures pass through the pages or appear in passing in the background, while the descent into the hell of war unfolds gradually, page by page. Uclés stands firmly on the foundations of magical realism; improbable coincidences unfold with an air of plausibility before the reader’s eyes; he converses directly with his characters (even with Franco himself), and encourages curious minds to listen to his musical selections at the end of each chapter to recreate the atmosphere of the reading experience.
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The book has been honored with numerous awards and accolades—so many that listing them alone would take up the entire space of this article. The author is the prodigy of his generation, with a multifaceted artistic presence across various art forms. What judgment can one possibly make in the face of the heavy weight of the awards he carries? On one side of the scale, I place the courage and depth of his research, his ability to write beyond the boundaries of the historical novel, the composition of his stories, the balance between horrifying tales and the beauty of art. I devoured the first half of the story with insatiable fervor, as if reuniting with a loved one who had been taken from me years ago. From the middle onward, however, I found myself growing restless with the deluge of material, which seems to suggest that the author succumbed to the need to say it all, to spread his wings like a peacock, to force us to bow down before his titanic work. At the same time, what seemed like ingenious devices at first—such as direct dialogue with the book’s characters—began to feel like a gimmick, a trick repeated on the main stage that loses its magic, and the artistic digressions carried an air of affectation that clouded my initial impressions. All of this brings me back to the idea of the encounter: you appreciate and take stock of the time spent reading, but also, later on, the book’s impact. Not to assign a value, but to reflect on what is unfolding before you.
Nicholas Kyriakou is a lawyer.
