He jugado con lobos
Janer Manila's novel of Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja, the boy sold to a goatherd and left alone in the Sierra Morena, drawn from the interviews behind his doctoral thesis.
A book that moves between extreme harshness and the most subtle tenderness.
Janer Manila met Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja in 1975, at the start of doctoral research on children raised outside human society. Marcos had been back among people for ten years and was working as a servant. Over several months Janer Manila recorded his account of the Sierra Morena, wrote it up as a thesis, and thirty years later made the same material into this short novel.
The telling is first person and stays inside the child's understanding of what is happening to him. Nothing is explained from outside, so the events arrive in the order and the shape Marcos gave them, which is the book's method and also its limit. Catalan reviewers praised the prose and found the narration linear.
It is published as young adult fiction, which undersells what it offers a clinician: a first person account of extreme abandonment by someone who has no theory of what happened to him, and no interest in producing one.
About the author
Gabriel Janer Manila
Gabriel Janer Manila (born 1940 in Algaida, Mallorca) is a Catalan writer and academic who taught in the pedagogy department of the University of the Balearic Islands. He writes fiction in Catalan, winning the Ramon Llull prize in 2007 for the novel Tigres, and has published widely on childhood, imagination, and education. His doctoral work studied feral children, including Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja, the boy raised among wolves in the Sierra Morena, examining socialization and human development.
Details
- 2010
- He jugat amb els llops
- Catalan
- La Galera
- La Galera, Bridge collection, Spanish translation by Alicia Mulet, 2010
- 160
- 9788424635206