Saint Manuel, Martyr

This brief novel is a framed novel in which Angela Carballino (the narrator), a woman in her fifties, presents the story as her memoir. The memoir chronicles the spiritual experiences of Don Manuel, the priest of a remote mountain village called Valverde de Lucerna. Angela reveals Don Manuel’s true feelings about his religion; that is, his loss of faith in God. Saint Manuel, Martyr explores deep religious and philosophical paradoxes that question the meaning of life and death. In sum, the novel portrays a simple man without faith, who in his solitude, loneliness, and suffering sees that faith is merely an illusion, a dream that the common man dreams to fend off the terrible truth that only the brotherhood and nature in this world counts—that there’s no otherworldly eternity. His life, then, is a deliberate fraud to console his parishioners.