WHAT REMAINS Asks What Survives After Everything Is Lost

Brais Lamela’s debut novel, What Remains, opens with a lecture on forensic architecture that the novel’s narrator, a Galician PhD student living in New York, is only half listening to as he helps himself to a second serving at the lunch buffet. His attention often drifts between concerns about his dissertation, life in the city, and his increasingly serious relationship with his girlfriend, Mariana. Only later, waiting at a bus stop, does he return to the lecture and wonder: “Is it really possible to restore what’s been lost, to reconstruct places that no longer exist for the displaced, and in the process achieve some sort of justice, or at least alleviate their grief?”

The question might just as easily be asked of the narrator’s own research, which concerns a little-known episode of Spanish history: the displacement of rural communities in Galicia under Franco’s dictatorship, when villages were submerged to create hydroelectric reservoirs and their inhabitants relocated to newly constructed settlements. The novel really takes off when the narrator becomes preoccupied with a woman he discovers in the archives. Displaced from her village and resettled, she was subsequently expelled from her new home. The records document her displacement but reveal little of her life. Perhaps this is why the narrator turns to writing fiction: What begins as his attempt to write a dissertation gradually takes the shape of a novel, presumably the novel we are reading. Fiction, Lamela suggests, might offer a form of restitution in its ability to imagine what the historical record cannot recover.

But this is not even the novel’s greatest trick. Lamela turns the narrator’s scrutiny of the archive onto his own fiction and reveals how stories about the past are always shaped by the act of telling. In one scene, Mariana suddenly interjects into the novel’s narrative, breaking the illusion of a self-contained fictional world as she challenges the narrator’s account and the liberties he has taken with the facts. Later, his father recalls their journey through Galicia differently from the way the narrator described it, casting doubt on what we have already been told. In both instances, Lamela exposes the machinery of storytelling, reminding us that neither the bureaucratic language of the archive nor the inventions of a novelist can offer an unmediated account of the past. What fiction offers, then, is not an escape from these limitations but a way of making them more visible. It is this tension between the impossibility of fully restoring what is lost and the necessity of trying that makes What Remains such an affecting novel.

I exchanged emails with Lamela about Galicia’s forgotten histories, the ideological uses of architecture, and writing books that are “airy vessels.”

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Evander James Reyes: Let’s start at the beginning. When did you first start thinking about this story, and how did it develop into the novel?

Brais Lamela: I would say that the book emerged first from a very vivid sense of surprise, or maybe unsettlement, with regards to my native region. I come from Galicia, which is this very rural region, and I guess we often think of rural regions as areas where not much happens, or at least not big history events. And at some point, I started to pick up on certain words that people in my family would say, like they would refer to some of our neighbors as the “colonists” or some hamlets as the “colonial towns,” and I just asked: What do you mean? That is how I began to ask more about this story, which is the story of how people were forcibly displaced due to the construction of a water dam that had been relocated to this region where I grew up, the Terra Chá, as part of a modernization project. It created this sense of unsettlement, as if all these things that appeared to me as natural were actually the result of these huge historical forces. It was out of this unsettlement that the novel was born.

EJR: I am struck by your description of discovering that a landscape you had always taken for granted was actually the product of larger structural forces. Did writing the novel change the way you understood your own memories of growing up in Galicia?

BL: Yes, I would say the process of writing the novel changed how I see my memories of growing up, and perhaps even how I see Galicia more generally. Because the novel, while set in the present, deals a lot with these tangible details that ultimately come from my childhood. For instance, rural Galicia is filled with abandoned houses, collapsed rooftops, and overgrown weeds. As a child, I used to wonder a lot about them, and I think some of that filtered into the novel, particularly in one of the last scenes, where the narrator enters one of those houses. On some level, the process has been one of interrogating these presences, which have a haunting quality, and also speaking about the vast processes of rural migration and dispossession, which are at the heart of the novel. 

EJR: The English translation of the title, What Remains, suggests an interesting dichotomy between absence and possibility. Were you thinking about “what remains” primarily in terms of loss, of what has disappeared, or in terms of what survives and the possibility of something new emerging?

I like to see books as spaces of interaction, where different worlds enter into dialogue with each other.

BL: Yes! I really like how you put it. To me, it sounds both like a question, perhaps a desperate question, and an affirmation: What, if anything, remains? And at the same time, affirming that something, indeed, remains. I think that tension goes to the heart of the novel, which in Galician is titled, literally, “No one remains.” But really I think that the novel is much more interested in habitation than in nostalgia. It’s not so much a lament about what has been lost; rather, it tries to grasp for those things that indeed remain, even in a flooded village.

EJR: I was struck by your use of space throughout the novel, particularly the way the apartment the narrator shares with his girlfriend gradually transforms over the course of their relationship, reflecting the changes in their lives together. How were you thinking about the relationship between the spaces we inhabit and the emotional lives we build within them?

BL: I would say that, perhaps paradoxically, being constantly on the move gives you this very textured understandings of domestic space. Like many people in New York City, I’ve changed apartments more times than I can remember, and each new place has also come with new relationships, new forms of experiencing space. I think there is something about the ritual of moving in and out of places, of boxing and unboxing, that gives you a very concrete impression about domesticity. I think of home not as something fixed, but as something that is done and undone constantly, and that understanding filters into those descriptions in the novel. 

EJR: But architecture can also be used to manipulate or control the way people live. In the Franco-era dwellings in Terra Chá, you write about how the kitchens were deliberately designed to discourage communal life. How were you thinking about the ways architecture can be used to impose particular social relationships or even an ideology on the people who inhabit it?

BL: One of the first things that calls your attention, when you see the houses that were built for these displaced peoples, is that they are radically different from the vernacular architecture of Galicia—they look like white, uniform blocks. It’s almost as if they are trying to announce themselves, to serve as the mouthpieces of an ideology. And that carried through inside: So, for instance, they built these tiny kitchens, when in the Galician countryside the kitchen is very important, it’s the communal place where people gather around the fire to be together. I have always been fascinated with that aspect of architecture, how it’s something we assume as natural, even though it shapes the most intimate aspects of our lives and was designed by someone else, often with an agenda that is far from neutral.

EJR: Migration and displacement run throughout the novel, from the narrator’s position as an immigrant in New York to the forced relocation of rural Galician communities under Franco. How did you think about these different experiences in relation to the novel’s broader themes of diaspora, belonging, and home?

BL: There are different possible answers to that question. I definitely did not want to compare two forms of displacement that are, of course, radically different: On the one hand, you have people that were forcibly displaced by a brutal dictatorship; on the other, a 20-year old hanging out in New York who feels this vague sense of nostalgia. To me, perhaps it was more about interrogating my own life and why I seem to feel drawn to stories about nomadic lives, displacement, or people who are out of place. I think I wanted to bring my own life into the work to examine somehow why I feel so invested in these questions. 

EJR: In the second half of the novel, the narrator returns to Galicia, where his relationship with his father, who has been left paralyzed and unable to speak, comes more fully into focus. Why was it important for the narrator to return home, and how were you thinking about his relationship with his father in this part of the novel?

I was writing the book in New York, where it’s difficult to have a sense of private space . . . It seems that writing here always takes place in a room that isn’t entirely your own.

BL: I think I always envisioned the book as a novel in two parts because I wanted to have this mirror-effect between the New York and Galicia settings. I like to see books as spaces of interaction, where different worlds enter into dialogue with each other. The first part is a bit more abstract, almost groundless, while the second has a very strong sense of place. In the second part, the figure of the father stands in opposition to the narrator. He is someone who makes things rather than just thinking about them. He’s also the figure that grounds many of the themes of the book. The father, who, of course, is inspired by my father, is someone affected by a neurological disease. Yet even with that disease, he creates—but it’s a slow, mediated form of creation. It’s not an invention from scratch but rather a way of working through what’s left, of making something out of discarded and abandoned objects, which is also the poetics of the book.

EJR: Both the narrator’s father and Mariana offer counternarratives to his version of events, often questioning or challenging the way he tells his own story. These moments seem to cast doubt on the narrator’s account while also drawing attention to the process by which stories are constructed. Why was it important for you to include these competing perspectives, and what interested you about exposing the workings of fiction in this way?

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BL: Because the narrator’s voice is so dominant in the book, I liked the idea of opening the text up to other perspectives and possibilities. I like to think of books as open, airy vessels: spaces that aren’t over-determined by their own mechanics, inviting to voices that might unsettle the story being told. Maybe this also has something to do with the fact that I was writing the book in New York, where it’s difficult to have a sense of private space with all these shared apartments and crowded spaces. It seems that writing here always takes place in a room that isn’t entirely your own.

EJR: For readers who might be unfamiliar with Galician literature, where would you recommend they start? Are there particular writers or books you think deserve a wider readership?

BL: It’s probably a good idea to start with what my excellent translator, Jacob Rogers, has brought into English. I would enthusiastically recommend the work of Berta Dávila, for instance, who has very distinctive prose: Hypnotic, unhurried, somehow strange. There is also a long poetic tradition. Galicia is quite distinctive in that poetry is its national genre and many of Galicia’s most celebrated authors are poets. Among those translated to English, I would say that Chus Pato is the key author, perhaps the poet who has done the most to recover the tradition of the avant-garde. I also think everyone should read Dicen, by Susana Sánchez Arins, which was translated as And They Say. It is a fascinating exercise of building a story about the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the repression of the dictatorship through hearsay and rumor—truly spectacular work. Finally, I would say that the most revolutionary author of Galician literature, and one of the truly great authors of 20th century Europe, remains criminally unknown beyond our borders: XL Méndez Ferrín. 

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