Review: A recipe for the bittersweet
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 4, 2013
I received a review copy of this novel from the author at my request.The Girl from Tenerife by Bernard Schaffer is a short novel full of raw emotion. The narrator, whose name is withheld till the end, is a self-published writer on the ropes, burned out, out of shape, divorced from  an angry woman and sustained by the love of his two children and by a grandfatherly man he has known since childhood.The narrator falls in love with a Spanish woman named Sahily after meeting her at a restaurant. This provokes him to try to restore some order in his life. He decides to try to write at a higher literary level than his usual science fiction serial, engaging in hallucinatory battles with Ernest Hemingway; in real life, he gets mixed up in the business of small-town police dealing with big-city drug problems. He pursues Sahily for love on the grounds that she is THE ONE, even though there is a pretty serious obstacle in the way. It is a recipe for the bittersweet. The book hinges on the reader's willingness to commit to the tragedy of the situation. One can't help rooting for the narrator, and wondering what secrets Sahily hides that could give the story's hero the happy ending he richly deserves. The wondering is nigh unendurable. Hope hurts; happiness is of the moment; certainty is for suckers. But we can't help hoping, we can't help seeking happiness, and we can't help longing for certainty in a world full of melancholy and destruction.The book is very well-written and very sincere. I would call this some of Bernard's finest prose, but he writes his finest prose in most every book.  Bernard wants to lay it all on the line here, but I think he lays it all on the line all the time:  that's just the sort of writer he is.  And really, despite the representation made in this book that writers can be phony for the sake of readers and write with their heart not in it, I don't think that's true. Hemingway is paraphrased in the book as having said that writing is bleeding on the page. That's true, of course. It's mentally and emotionally bruising when you write anything more than a routine job-related text.  I suspect we are to make a metaphorical connection between the girl from Tenerife and a work of literary greatness, that thing aspired to which is impossibly beautiful and which remains a constant tease.That's fine, but for me, Hemingway is just a guy, whose influence comes from being a man whose moment had come. Bernard and I and the narrator may not be able to be great, but not because we don't have the stuff:  rather, because there are not great writers anymore. Being a great artist, rather than a master craftsman, is a conceit (a literary device) belonging to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Greatness is an illusion, really. Our real goal is to have lives that satisfy us and, when writing, to please our readers and our own tastes. These are difficult enough goals to achieve in a century full of peril and scandal, but I will keep working toward them, and I know Bernard will as well. See you at the end of the line, my friend.