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Between the stifling atmosphere of New York City and the fog-covered mountains of Negueira de Muniz, What Remains follows a young Galician student researching the Franco regime's vast project of forced resettlement. In the 1950s, more than half the inhabitants of the villages in Negueira de Muniz, Galicia, were driven from their land in a brutal experiment to turn 'backward' country people into modern cattle farmers. Amid the weight of unsettling archival documents, the voices of the displaced, and a sweltering New York summer, the unnamed narrator discovers the mysterious story of a woman who disappeared from her settlement without a trace. As he pieces together her strange fate, he confronts his own temporary status in a foreign land and wonders what it means to call a place home. Intimate and dreamlike, What Remains is a meditation on the ruins of memory and an urgent exploration of identity, colonialism, and resistance. Inventively blending memoir, fiction, anthropology and travel writing, the novel investigates, with surprising intuition, the traces left in the places we inhabit.
Between the stifling atmosphere of New York City and the fog-covered mountains of Negueira de Muniz, What Remains follows a young Galician student researching the Franco regime's vast project of forced resettlement. In the 1950s, more than half the inhabitants of the villages in Negueira de Muniz, Galicia, were driven from their land in a brutal experiment to turn 'backward' country people into modern cattle farmers. Amid the weight of unsettling archival documents, the voices of the displaced, and a sweltering New York summer, the unnamed narrator discovers the mysterious story of a woman who disappeared from her settlement without a trace. As he pieces together her strange fate, he confronts his own temporary status in a foreign land and wonders what it means to call a place home. Intimate and dreamlike, What Remains is a meditation on the ruins of memory and an urgent exploration of identity, colonialism, and resistance. Inventively blending memoir, fiction, anthropology and travel writing, the novel investigates, with surprising intuition, the traces left in the places we inhabit.