Chains (408 pages) is Xabier López López’s ninth work of adult fiction and was published in 2013, having won the Xerais Prize for best novel. That same year, Xabier López López was voted author of the year by the digital magazine of Galician literature Fervenzas Literarias.

Each alternate chapter in the novel is headed ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’. In the first chapter, an author spots a young, blonde, almost albino woman reading his novel on the beach. In ‘Condensed Milk’, a sea captain, H.P. Stewart, runs into a gale off the Galician coast and remembers how he acquired his watch from a shipwreck off the Kentish coast when he was a boy. The owner of a restaurant, Ramiro, tells the author how a school-bus driver from Cornwall, Allison Atkinson, visited Galicia’s Coast of Death to leave some flowers for her great-uncle, who was buried there after a shipwreck. A student in Santiago, Xosé Miguel, writes to a priest staying with his parents, Father Florencio, to ask him to send money. An acquaintance, Xoán Carlos, then tries to blackmail the priest for a much higher sum. This chapter is written as a series of letters.

The author continues to imagine the woman from the beach reading his book, One Last Waltz, a historical novel set in Paris, in which he lampoons all social classes and in particular writers such as Hemingway. We are told of a plan to erect a monument to all those British soldiers who have lost a testicle in times of war. Over the next two days, the woman fails to reappear on the beach. A group of Galician infantrymen in the Rif War hit the town and want to visit a prostitute, but there are six of them and only one of her, so one of the party, a writer, suggests the bravest can have her, the one who is prepared to head into the mountains and come back with the ear of the guerrilla leader Abd el-Krim. By the end of the night, four have returned with an ear. Finally, on Friday, the woman reappears, her name is Almudena, and this is the fourth novel by this author that she has read. She invites him to dinner. The author arrives, meets her husband, Juan Pedro, and their five children (the author is surprised at the woman’s slender figure). In Buenos Aires, a plaque is erected, commemorating the names of 34 men shot in the town of B. in Galicia during the Spanish Civil War. One, however, a certain Francisco Cortiñas, held right-wing beliefs, attended Mass on a regular basis and was shot by a civil guard for refusing to hand over the typewriter that belonged to his imprisoned and left-wing brother. Over dinner, Almudena’s family, which appears to be quite well-off (a live-in maid, two German cars), asks the author whether it is possible to make a living from writing literature. The author is unsure how sincere to be in his response, whether to explain that most authors live a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence of writing and holding down a job that pays the bills. It turns out Juan Pedro is a surgeon.

The owner of the third most important brewery in Galicia relates to a journalist from the daily El Compostelano how he first tasted beer as a child at the 1889 Paris Exposition, in a beer tent belonging to the Free State of Bavaria. His second experience was in Cuba, where he was on military service, then in Santiago de Compostela as a university student, though even as a teenager he had recovered a crate with bottles of beer from an English shipwreck. Juan Pedro then begins to criticize the use of a third-person narrator in the author’s previous novel, A Papier-Mâché World. At some festas, the trumpet player in an orchestra hooks up with the young woman serving beer at a stall. They drink several beers laced with tequila, and he tells her all the places he has visited in the world, including Buenos Aires, where it seems the woman’s father lives. They end up returning to her room and, after making love, he offers to take her to Coruña, where he is due to play the following evening, though he knows, once it is morning, he will silently get dressed and leave.

The author seeks refuge in the bathroom of Almudena’s house and remembers his first kiss, as well as the painter J.M.W. Turner’s nocturnal scenes. He wishes he was back at the restaurant he frequents, sharing a drink with the owner, Ramiro. When he returns to the table, Almudena asks why he has chosen this exact place to come on holiday, and the author confesses it has to do with his first love. They ask him why he doesn’t write about it. The author admits he could write a novel about someone else’s first love, but not his own. In a manuscript discovered in a nursing home, we read about a certain ‘Xan’ who was sent with his regiment to Cuba. Xan begins to frequent the bar Le sourire du caïman, which is run by a black man called Prosper. Xan gains a reputation for being rich and demanding in his taste for women. Prosper offers to introduce him to a mulatto woman, Dolores Fueyo, the well-educated daughter of a Spanish landowner who lives in the south of the city. Xan and Dolores begin to meet, to have conversations and play draughts, she undresses in his presence, though it is some time before they make love. Xan is besotted and waits impatiently for their meeting each week, but one Tuesday he is confronted by Prosper in Dolores’ bedroom, who accuses him of sleeping with a married woman and tries to blackmail him. There is a scuffle, and Xan shoots Prosper dead. Xan is transferred to the capital, Santiago de Cuba. On the way, two criminals, Moncho and Cidre, escape, knocking Xan out with a rock so he won’t be suspected of having been in league with them. In Santiago de Cuba, he is employed behind a desk in the military government. One day, after work, he comes across Dolores in a restaurant, in the company of a man who is very different from the one Prosper claimed was her husband. Xan is then caught up in a battle with the Americans and thinks Moncho and Cidre did well to escape. Wherever they may be must be better than the trenches.

The author asks if Almudena and Juan Pedro had the chance to meet Allison Atkinson on her visit to Galicia. They had tea with her. They then talk about the fate of Jews in World War Two, the ships MS St Louis and Bessarabia. In Santa María de Reboredo, a small village with barely twenty inhabitants halfway between Santiago de Compostela and Pontevedra, a hospital porter is employed at an unusually large and ramshackle hospital for patients who require discretion. His job is to transport corpses from their rooms to the morgue. One night, there is a power cut because of a storm. The porter is called to remove a body from room 433, which turns out to be that of a child. He is just removing the body in the dark when the child comes to and asks where he is. The porter quickly returns him to his room (the child is now having difficulty breathing) and goes to find the assistant director, a German by the name of Raphael, who, when he hears there is a child, grabs a gun and accompanies the porter. When they get to the room, however, the child has disappeared.

The live-in maid, Marita, comes to put the children to bed. Before falling asleep, they ask for the author. We are given the top five musical hits in Spain, America and Britain on the day the last maquis or resistance fighter in Galicia was caught by the Civil Guard and shot. After the author has wished the children good night, Juan Pedro takes this opportunity to show him some old papers belonging to his grandfather during the Spanish Civil War. He asks him whether he has ever been interested in writing about the Civil War – not just its political aspect, but its epic aspect. Ramón Sánchez compares his life with that of the writer Rafael Dieste, until a certain point, when their paths diverge and Ramón Sánchez works as an administrative assistant to a Nazi doctor. A piece of paper falls out of the author’s jacket pocket with the titles of books published in 1965. Francisco Mantiñán stays at a nursing home run by nuns who object to him smoking. He likes still to go out walking, stopping at the kiosk, buying single cigarettes and visiting the bar. He used to manage a soft-drinks factory, but the business has gone downhill sine he left it to his incompetent son, Alberte. He has a much better relationship with his grandson, Luís, the only one to go to university, who has clashed with the secret police.

The author claims the list of titles published in 1965 are notes for his next work of fiction. We are given possible film listings for the week when the last maquis in Galicia was shot. The author affirms that his next work is both a novel and a book of short stories, that, like life, a work can be both: life is a series of events which we attempt to mould into a whole. It is the local festas, and a group of three men, José Antonio, Xurxo and Gabriel, meet up to drink several bottles of wine. On the way to the fairground, they bump into four girls, one of whom, Rocío, Gabriel likes and José Antonio flirts with. They then meet the brass band that will be playing at the festas, but are interrupted by a gang of bullies from a neighbouring town. There is a slight scuffle. On the way back, the three men encounter the leader of the gang, and Gabriel kicks him a couple of times, smashing his teeth, until he lands in the river. This chapter is told from the point of view of all three protagonists, how they see what happens, their different perspectives.

The author is asked whether the characters in his new book (a novel? short stories?) are all the same. The Galician poet Manuel Antonio enters a bar and hears an old man telling how, when he was first officer on board a steamship, Heart of Darkness, they were driven by a storm and landed at an island, where they came across a white woman on her own, dressed according to the fashion of Paris. The old man is called Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski and takes Manuel Antonio to meet the woman, who is extremely beautiful and speaks Galician. Manuel Antonio falls in love and offers to marry her, but the next day she has disappeared together with the steamship Heart of Darkness. Manuel Antonio understands that her name, Alecto, is that of one of the Furies. He finds a paper boat with a poem, in which she promises to come back for him. This story about Manuel Antonio is followed by a literary analysis of all its elements – title, characters, place, technique – and its suitability to be published.

The author defends that the protagonists of one story should be secondary actors in another, be they people, concepts or simple objects. In this way, literature resembles life more closely. A seaside town in Galicia is visited in summer by people from Madrid. The narrator’s family invites two of the families from Madrid for lunch. It is rumoured that the elder daughter of one family is pregnant, and she vomits at the end of the meal. Meanwhile, the father of the other family claims Galicia is very nice and green, but the whole thing needs modernizing, which irks the narrator’s uncle, Xosé, who receives disability benefit and, when asked what he does for a living, says he reads. That evening, the narrator masturbates while fantasizing about the elder daughter, but then remembers she is pregnant and ejaculates while fantasizing about the mother of the other family, Blanca, thereby breaking two rules (not to masturbate in bed; to fantasize only about girls his own age). The boys play football and visit a secluded pool, where one winter a dead man turned up who some claimed to have been a smuggler. Just before the local festas, Blanca appears in her husband’s taxi and offers to take the children on an excursion to Coruña. On the way back, she retains the narrator in the car. Just when he thinks the moment has come, she casually asks him if he knows where she can get an antique watch valued which her husband has discovered on the beach with his metal detector. When he asks whether they will be coming to his house for lunch on the all-important day of the festas, she replies a little maliciously that they will be going to the house of a lawyer whose son is planning to study in Madrid.

‘Literature, like life itself, doesn’t cease to be an accumulation of false progressions and parallelisms, a chain, so to speak, with interchangeable links whose resemblance is merely superficial.’ This sentence, and the broken-up series of chapters devoted to the fictional author’s awkward and unsatisfactory meeting with his two readers, justifies the title of this novel, Chains, a sequence of disjointed texts, like life itself, in which the reader seeks to find common ground, but is ultimately carried along by the real author’s narrative expertise and undoubted ability to entertain. Xabier López López is one of Galicia’s most consummate writers, and his novel the winner of one of the most prestigious fiction prizes, the Xerais, in 2013.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne