The South and Bene

Since the 1985 publication of her first book, El Sur y Bene, Garc a Morales has emerged as an important literary figure in Spain. Containing two interwoven coming-of-age novellas, the book is narrated in the voice of Adriana, a young woman unraveling the painful secrets of her childhood. In a narrative set in a labyrinthine gothic landscape sometime after the Spanish Civil War, Adriana speaks almost exclusively to the ghost of her father, who committed suicide. With the tone of a film noir voice-over, she recounts playing Joan of Arc as a child--and trying to burn an aunt at the stake. She learned divination from her outcast father, setting the stage for several semimiraculous events and giving the story its magical-realist tone. There is good and evil here, yet the ""good"" characters provide only moralistic rules and harsh judgments (to her mother, Adriana is ""an inevitable misfortune""); the ""evil"" father dispenses love, guidance and magic. The second novella, also in the first person but more conventional in format, concerns the family's mysterious Gypsy maid, Bene, who may be a demon herself or the victim of diabolic machinations. Burdened with overly cinematic and occasionally contrived moments, this book is still popular in Spain, and will be of interest to U.S. readers mainly as a first work by an influential European author. (Nov.)