Book Review: "la casa" by Paco Roca

la casa (The House) (2015)
Paco Roca (1969)
131 pages

In Paco Roca’s graphic novel la casa (The House), three siblings and their spouses come together at their family’s weekend home, a year after the passing of their father. The reunion becomes a bittersweet experience, as their work repairing and cleaning the home and grounds to make it ready to sell leads them to recall, and often reassess childhood memories of time spent at the house and their differing reactions to it.

Their memories reveal their father’s deep and enduring investment of time and effort into the house. To be able to afford it at all, he had paid to have the basic frame built, but had then finished the interior and the surrounding grounds on his own – requiring, it becomes clear, significant and on-going work from his children. His focus on this vacation home also becomes evident in that Roca tells us nothing of the family's principal residence in the city or even the father's occupation; the father seems to have spent every available minute at the vacation home with his family, continually working on some project or other to improve it.

Though I don’t have experience with such a second home from my childhood, I now do from my wife’s side of the family, for whom the original family home has become a second home in which no one lives permanently. I found her family’s experiences reflected in many of those of the siblings in Roca’s story. Certainly, the considerable challenges of upkeep of the house and property over time, particularly when no one is living there day-to-day: who takes responsibility, when so many are at least nominally implicated, but everyone is busy with their lives? Also, how to decide on the future of the house, as the generation whose memories are most tightly bound up in it, age. But even at a less profound level, the comment of one of the brothers resonates, as he points out objects in the house to his spouse and notes: 

Everything in the house arrived over time, as we remodeled the apartment we lived in. This is where all the old junk my parents no longer used ended up, along with the things that neither my siblings nor I wanted. 

(Todo lo que hay en la casa ha ido llegando con el tiempo, según remodelábamos el piso donde vivíamos. Aquí han ido a parar todos los trastos viejos que mis padres ya no usaban y también las cosas que ni mis hermanos ni yo queríamos.) (16)

Roca places the eponymous house at the center of the story, giving it an almost animating force which, beyond setting the scene, drives much of the dialogue and action, principally through the recollections it triggers in the siblings. Some of these memories center on the poignant reality of their father’s decline and so inability to continue caring for the house; but I found most affecting the reactions of these now adult children to their recollections.

It becomes evident that the powerful memories of their youth spent at the house, as well as of their young adulthood as they increasingly seldom made it back, form a core part of their feelings about their own childhood and who they have become as adults; and, as well, their impressions of, and so relationships with, their siblings. Yet the discussions that occur between them as they return together to the house – in their father's physical absence yet almost palpable presence – reveal misconceptions in their thinking about their father, their siblings, and even the true nature of their own childhood. Their comments reveal not only the untrustworthiness of memories but, perhaps more critically, the importance of being curious: about the origins and validity of our beliefs as well as our impressions of others, and to be open to reassessing and changing them.

This is the second of Roca’s graphic novels that I’ve read (my review of the other, The Abyss of Oblivion, on state-sponsored killings during and after the Spanish Civil War, is linked to at right). These stories, each powerfully charged and deeply moving – if clearly at wildly different levels of mortal consequence – demonstrate Roca brilliantly managing the delicate balance of conveying to readers the emotional depth in scenes without ever tipping over into maudlin exhibitionism. To accomplish this, he makes excellent use of the graphic medium in combination with his text to bring his characters, their surroundings and their memories alive and vivid for readers.

It will hardly come as a surprise then, that I already have another of his graphic novels in my to-read pile…

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Other notes and information:

I read this in Spanish (my translation of the quote above from Spanish), but there is an English language edition available.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf