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language: Welsh
country: United Kingdom
year: 1961
form: novel
genre(s): literary, speculative
dates read: 24.3.24-29.3.24
Caradog Prichard’s Un Nos Ola Leuad is widely regarded as the greatest Welsh novel of all time, and I can see why. just stylistically it’s exhilarating, mimicking both the dialect and register of informal speech in the Bethesda area where Prichard himself grew up to narrate the life of a nameless boy being raised by his single mother in a small village during the years surrounding the First World War.
it is devastating, but in a strikingly understated way: the book is written as a series of anecdotes coming to the narrator’s mind in stream of consciousness form on the titular “one moonlit night” (the title of Philip Mitchell’s English translation). we see his best friends die young or move south in search of better-paying jobs, we see neighbors and relatives die in the war, we see suicides and violence and mental breakdowns under the pressures of poverty in an extremely marginalized working-class community. this is a community that is being destroyed by forces over which its people have no control and which they cannot even really perceive: capitalism, imperialist war, and the social and economic pressures applied to Welsh-speaking communities in particular by the British state.
it’s described in some places as a counterpoint to certain romantic trends re northwest Wales in early 20th-century writing, and to some extent I see why: it certainly pulls no punches in its portrayal of the effects of poverty and social marginalization. it does, however, affirm the continued strength of community bonds in the face of this: when there is crisis or need, the people of the village come together to face it. the problem is simply that crisis is unrelenting and need never-ending, and the community simply cannot keep up.
and yet because the narrator is, for the most part, describing incidents from his childhood, it is in fact oddly upbeat in tone: the narration is clearly aware of what it’s showing, but the narrator himself is a believable child, unable yet to make sense of it all as parts of a larger system even as it consumes him, too.
framing this are two enigmatic figures, Brenhines y[r] Wyddfa (the Queen of Snowdon) and Brenhines y Llyn Du (the Queen of the Black Lake), who speak in triumphant, high-register monologues calling out to the narrator, caught between them.
I don’t know that I quite agree with Philip Mitchell’s characterization of it as staring into the face of god, but. it’s really, really good.
moods: dark, grimy, reflective