Facendera

A surprising debut about the art of shaping the person you love with words.

Facendera is a sort of community work that mobilizes an entire village with the same objective.The narrator of this novel explains the term to Aguedita in the middle of a party, where he tells her a story while she interrupts with her questions.A story about the son of the pharmacist and the daughter of The One with the Feed, about a town in Leon where they’ve closed down the mines, the central terminal will be demolished, and there is no future. A story about people without expectations who consume bricks and pills that combat a pain that is as real as the anxiety and depression that everyone feels. And it’s also a story about love and sex, about customized cars, encounters in gas station parking lots, dust from the ruins of a chapel, experiments with roosters and rooster testicles.And, above all, a story about those who tell stories in order to seduce, manipulate, fool.

A novel about what it means to be young in a shithole town, about a Spain that is empty and desolate, but also shameless and radically against itself— that branded Spain that can perhaps be saved by a collective fiction and a sort of idea of a community.

«It’s like being at a party full of strangers and, suddenly, someone whose face you can’t quite make out starts telling you a story that is so sweet, so engaging, and so dark that you don’t want to take your attention from it even for a second.That’s what I felt while reading Óscar García Sierra’s first novel: helplessness, strangeness, tenderness, drunkenness.The truth is, I still haven’t been able to escape from Facendera’s claws. If I were you, I would let myself be overwhelmed» (Luna Miguel).

“The poet Óscar García Sierra’s novel debut depicts a decaying provincial world (…) Within this novel lies a certain lyricism, a preoccupation for aesthetic beauty.” (Javier Menéndez Llamazares, El Diario Montañés — Sotileza).

“The simplicity with which García Sierra talks about his own writing contrasts sharply with his impressive mastery when it comes to storytelling. It’s the same deceptive simplicity with which the protagonists, washed up kids without any apparent duplicity, start to unravel their talent for manipulation and lies. That’s how readers find themselves inadvertently submerged in a complex narrative structure, where facts become a strange labyrinth full of mirrors that is hard to exit without breaking something. A labyrinth made of rumors in which the desire to talk about others matters more than whether or not the stories are true.” (Manuel Guedán, El Periódico de España). 

“The haze that comes with questioning the authenticity of stories is an important facet of Facendera, a novel that takes a popular Leonese word as its title. This name is used to designate the kind of community work that mobilizes an entire town with a common goal, like when all the neighborhood residents are called on to clean a park. This novel defends the idea that shared stories are also a kind of facendera—a thread used to knit together community.” (Victor M. Vela, El Norte de Castilla). 

“Oscar captures millennial disenchantment in an empty Spain (…) Other elements in Facendera include the construction of identities through lies, the pain of incomprehension between the elderly and the youth, and the deep longing for a dialect of your own, like Leonese. I’m realizing that I’m not the first journalist to say that this story has great potential to become a movie.” —Albert Gómez, The Objective
 “Some might find Facendera to be a story about juvenile anxiety, a vindication of the working class, or a festive, melancholic story from an after party. And all of that is true. But above all, the first novel by the Leonese poet Óscar García Sierra published by Anagrama is the reliable chronicle of a triple death—no fiction here, that’s how it happened.” (Pablo R. Roces, El Mundo).

 “The poet Óscar García Sierra’s debut novel is a work about the seductive power of words set in a Leonese town with no name or social or economic prospects, with residents who are drowning in anxiety. ‘Facendera,” which means the same thing as ‘auzolan’ in Basque, means communal work in Leonese (which has been vindicated through words and idioms). It is also a celebration of art as a way to tell stories.” (Iñigo Urrutia, El Diario Vasco).