Yellow rain

La lluvia amarilla (1988) is a work by the writer Julio Llamazares. It is the monologue of the last inhabitant of an abandoned village in the Aragonese Pyrenees, called Ainielle. Between the "yellow rain" of the autumn leaves, which is equated to the flow of time and memory, or in the hallucinating whiteness of the snow, the narrator's voice, at the gates of death, evokes other missing inhabitants. of the town, who abandoned him or died, and confronts us with the wanderings of his mind and the discontinuities of his perception in the phantom village of which loneliness has taken over. In this novel, Llamazares once again makes use of a living, precise and genuine vocabulary to create a poetic atmosphere and a very personal universe.

The novel is a poetic narrative that makes us reflect, not only on the central theme of the book (the abandonment of the peoples of the Pyrenees), but also on loneliness, time, death, sanity and madness. However, it is hard to believe that the main character, Andrés, a shepherd from Ainielle, could speak and manage the language as masterfully as shown in the book (let's remember that Ainielle is located in an area of historical predominance of Aragonese), written in first person.