06ABR25 – MÁLAGA.- Irish writer Aidan Higgins (1927-2015) has, among his many merits, to have promoted, with his novels and autobiographical texts, an international and cosmopolitan vision of Ireland, an image contrary to the one that was held of this country in the second half of the 20th century as an isolated and inward-looking country.
A peripatetic author, he travelled halfway around the world before returning to Ireland for good in the 1980s to write his memoirs, Spain being one of the places where he had lived for a time. In the early 1960s Nerja was a fishing village that was little affected by the sudden changes in landscape and mentality that were being brought about by the incipient tourism in places like Torremolinos and Marbella. There was, however, a discreet community of European and North American citizens who had taken refuge on the Nerjeña coast because of the tranquillity of the area and the ridiculously low prices of, for example, eating and drinking in a restaurant or even renting a house. It was there that Higgins settled with his wife, and the result of this experience was a novel, Balcony of Europe (1972), which had considerable repercussions at the time, becoming a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize.
The work, which has not been translated into Spanish, gives an insider's view of the first wave of expats who settled on the Costa del Sol before the tourist explosion of the mid-1960s. The main character, Dan Ruttle, a transcript of Higgins himself, moves to Nerja, attracted by the prospects of a life of freedom that his friend Roger, already settled in a cortijo near the town, tells him about in his letters. Dan will come into contact with the community of foreign expatriates who, indolent and with vague artistic aspirations, spend their days lying in the sun or drinking in the town's bars, indifferent to the local population, whom they either ignore or patronise. Franco's Spain is well portrayed in the novel, with frequent references to the poverty in which most people lived and the political repression of the time, but it is the foreign community of Nerja that is the focus of attention, this sort of down-and-out aristocracy who watch in amazement, for example, as the first tourists arrive in their Mediterranean paradise.
The Balcony of the title is, obviously, a central place in the geography of Nerja, but also a metaphor for the distancing with which Dan Ruttle, the Irishman who becomes a bohemian in Spain and has an extramarital affair with an American expatriate, observes everything around him, infected by the vital boredom of his companions. Undoubtedly a novel to be discovered.
(Sent by José Antonio Sierra)