ABOVE THE RAIN

A Spanish crime novel attempts to connect the dots across decades, countries, and continents as two nursing-home residents embark on a late-life search for meaning.

Miguel is a widower and retired bank director in his 70s who is losing his memory to Alzheimer’s. The slightly younger Helena has plenty of spirit and all her wits but has ended up in the same Spanish nursing home, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Following the suicide of another free-spirited resident, she realizes that time is short and life is fleeting. The pilgrimage she makes with Miguel defies credulity but ends with him in Sweden, alone. It is there that he notices a woman previously unknown to him and ponders how “people were mysteriously connected without ever realizing it.” It seems that it is Helena who has connected them, however tenuously. More than a half-century and hundreds of pages earlier, the novel’s prologue found Helena’s mother committing suicide by drowning, and threatening to kill her daughter along with her, all because of a complication it takes the rest of the novel to unravel. Miguel also had a troubled childhood, and both have had troubled marriages and relations with their children. Skipping back and forth across countries and decades, the novel explores their separate family bloodlines, from war and politics through love that is as passionate as it is taboo. Even as Miguel loses Helena (along with his memory), their mutual sense of mission never flags. No one could criticize del Árbol for lack of ambition, though this novel finds his characters a little too much at the mercy of chance and fate, as the reader struggles to find reasons to care.

With a penchant for the philosophical epic, del Árbol gets lost here in all the melodramatic detail.