A Sibila
Autobiographical story of the life of an aunt of the author, from what I can tell. Freaking ruthless female Scrooge, hiding her avarice with “charity”, piety, and religious adherence. This feels like a gender-swapped The Fountainhead, with less ideological ranting, but keeping the long stretches of voiceover reading the book.
Set in a rural location, the kind of small hellhole every writer wants to escape from. A very high cosmopolitrometer score. It starts with a somewhat down on their luck family, with a small-ish property in disrepair. A couple with three children, but the elder daughter is the head of the family, after the father dies. The rest of the people are either buffoons or run away to other places.
Only our Sybil remains, laboriously working on her life’s goals: amass money and buy up all the land around the big house, no matter how. All that matters is gold, money and lands. The gold remains in the drawers, the lands are rented, the money doesn’t even get to banks, lest they steal it. Her life remains as frugal as ever, even well into modernity.
She basically hates most of her family, and the feeling is mutual. Every time they visit, they quarrel over money, or some other trifling. She considers them fools, or traitors that abandoned their legacy to chase life in the city. The only person she respects is our writer, even though she thinks any intellectual pursuit is worthless and her life was wasted. Even so, this is enough for her will to bequeath most of her stuff to her, enabling her to write this very book, probably.
There’s a guy in town that could see himself marrying her, but she rebukes him when they are young. He takes it in stride, but after decades, he’s still there, old, alone, and ever infatuated with her, only to be rebuked again when she is closer to death. That’s cold.
I can see why this book was very popular in the North of Portugal, it’s a fitting portrait of the kind of small town insanity that still remains today, of land deals and people stockpiling gold while burning wood for heat. This is probably less prevalent in the South (see A Herdade, for the large scale landowners perspective), but I personally knew someone like this, and it was in a small southern city, not even a rural setting.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.