Not Exactly a Thesis

Brais Lamela explores fiction, history, and the slipperiness of the nonfiction novel in ‘What Remains,’ newly translated by Jacob Rogers.

By Michael BarronJanuary 15, 2026

• Literary Criticism

• Fiction

PITY AUTOFICTION, a genre that has troubled the novel since its inception. Truman Capote sniffed at what he called the documentary novel, an impure genre not to be confused with higher-minded nonfiction novels like his own In Cold Blood (1966). As he told George Plimpton during an interview to clarify the difference, “the author lets his imagination run riot over the facts!” Capote regarded In Cold Blood as the birth of a novelized form begat by creative journalism and fictional technique, whereas the documentary novel, he said, allows “all the latitude of the fiction writer, but usually contains neither the persuasiveness of fact nor the poetic attitude fiction is capable of reaching.” If he was coming off as arrogant, he added, it was to protect his child.

Some 60 years later, these distinctions hardly matter: most readers know the difference between what we now term creative nonfiction and autofiction. Capote found little legitimacy in the latter, ballyhooing modern novelists as being “too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; they’re enraptured by their navels, and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.” These days, many writers might agree with him, but Capote’s contemporaries challenged the notion. To Norman Mailer and Renata Adler, In Cold Blood was respectively “a failure of the imagination” and an “elaborate tease” of deeper truths. They both went on to write their own varietal blends of journalized fictions.

The quandary of this balance is at the heart of the writer and scholar Brais Lamela’s debut What Remains. The author calls it “essentially” a work of fiction. Its English translation by Jacob Rogers, from Lamela’s Galician, is calibrated to a piano-tuned exactness, yet this adverbial caveat is pregnant with ambiguity. First published in Spain, where it was one of El País’s “best books of 2022 in Catalan, Galician and Basque,” What Remains is also, essentially, a reported novel. It is autofictional in that the narrator, like his author, is a Galician who pursued graduate studies while residing in New York. It is nonfictional in that the narrator’s studies concern Franco’s notorious campaign to modernize Spain’s agricultural industry through hydro-territorial transformation. It is a novel because Lamela allows his imagination to pace around the facts.

What Remains is a novel preoccupied with veracity, even beginning like the abstract to a dissertation. A contextual note to the reader explains how, starting in the 1950s, Franco ordered hundreds of dams to be built in the verdant and mountainous countryside of northwest Galicia. What villages weren’t flooded by the reservoirs these dams created were “scattered above the water, like pockets of land on a man-made sea.” Offering no bridges to reconnect them with the mainland, displaced residents were left with a choice: eke it out on these islands or be “recolonized” to the region’s northeastern Terra Chá flatlands and educated in modernized farming and ranching. In the sweep of a generation, more than 50,000 people were forced from traditional ways of living to ones more oriented toward the market.

This Maoist-sounding project is the book’s specter. It’s not always on the mind of its narrator, but as the fount of his studies, it never completely leaves it either. When we’re introduced to him, the narrator is not hunched over his notes but over a platter of food. He’s at the open reception to a lecture on forensic architecture, where fragments of memory are used to recompose experiences. Over the course of three helpings and a bus ride home, his thoughts meander from the lecturer’s ideas to matters typical to denizens of the Big Apple: apartments and relationships. In an aside, he mentions that the yearlong academic scholarship that allowed him to stay in New York has lapsed.

It’s a procrastinatory way to begin a novel; the narrator is a bit too scatterbrained to tell it. Academics can be like that, but the narrator’s borrowed time doesn’t really allow him that leisure. He is in possession of a handful of recorded interviews with former colonists on a previous trip to Terra Chá, and his notebook is filled with numerous revisions to his thesis statement that sound more like koans than tangible proposals. Despite his commitment to the subject, finding his way into it has been difficult. By his admission, a fault of attention is to blame:

I have a hard time fixing my mind on a single thing, that I’m easily overcome by a natural tendency to drift away. My attention, it seems, is steered most of all by that which is impossible to know, elusive suggestions, mentions in archival documents that hint at the presence of clandestine and fleeting lives, now lost to us. My interest follows the secret reverberations of certain words, and lately, I’ve found myself thinking more and more often that what I want to write isn’t a thesis, or at least not exactly a thesis.

At least the first of the book’s two sections reads like a thesis in crisis. The double entendre of its title, “Those Who Leave,” refers both to the colonies he’s meant to be researching and the “choreography” of codependence among his polycule of expats. Coming together like a traffic zipper, his professional discoveries and personal reflections are slow to teethe. For a few rough pages, the reader is left stuck in what feels like yet another aimless novel about an ingenue New Yorker striving to hack it.

Lamela doesn’t avoid all the clichés of a New York novel, but the narrator’s insights as a foreigner can be fresh. Even after he moves in with his girlfriend, the city feels less inviting, less promising, a New York without parties, literary or otherwise. Attending a viewing of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976), Lamela comments upon the recognition he feels at seeing the filmmaker as a vagabond expatriate. “It’s not a celebration of adolescent life,” he writes, “nothing but the protagonist wandering the avenues without purpose, flitting in and out of the subway stations.”

To legitimize his “right to inhabit the country and continue to leech off its research grants,” the narrator turns his attention to possible US involvement in Franco’s agrarian escapade. If it’s there, it’s buried deep, and the narrator conjures a poetry of boredom to describe “the fossils of discourse,” “the tumid, calcified language” of Franco’s financial requests from the Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences (IICA) he trawls through in search of a smoking gun.

(The upside of being Lamela’s original audience is that readers in Spain aren’t going to need a primer on nefarious Franco-era initiatives. Anyone foreign to it can read What Remains without diving into American and Franco-era Spanish relations, but looking up, say, the Pact of Madrid—an agreement that granted Spain American economic support in exchange for a US military presence on its soil—does help explain why Franco would be in correspondence with American institutions.)

The narrator finally whiffs sulfur in a letter sent by Franco to the IICA mentioning his gratitude to one Dr. Arthur Tannenbaum, an economics professor at Columbia, for coming to see the project firsthand with an advisory team of American engineers and academics. It’s a tantalizing lead and easy to chase given that Columbia retains Tannenbaum’s archive of notebooks and dispatches, and stocks volumes of his publications. The narrator checks out Tannenbaum’s memoir, Light Denied: Reflections on Economic Development, to read on the subway.

Tannenbaum reveals himself to be more systematist than humanist, and thus sympathetic to Franco’s radical civilizing efforts. Paraphrasing Tannenbaum, the narrator notes that the professor believed “authoritarian regimes, not democracies, pulled off the most ambitious projects for the middle class” and was nonplussed at the difficulty in convincing “the common people” of what was good for them. His memoir’s title is a cheeky reference to this backward stubbornness.

Such a Kissingerian figure would be the holy grail for a graduate student in need of one. Tannenbaum’s cup so overflows with odious observations that they spill into the missives he sends his wife. His sentiment that colonists and their supervisors share a root of barbarity is one the narrator can barely stomach. “Tannenbaum’s objects of study,” he notes, “was, in a sense, my people, and his prose is that of a taxonomist picking out types, outlining differences […] all these men, whether workers or supervisors, had been born, according to Tannenbaum, out of the same corrupt, fallen nature.”

Tannenbaum’s quackery haunts the narrator’s thoughts, his sleep, his quotidian days and circumstantial life. By a kind of symbiosis, they begin to afflict his girlfriend:

“What’s the name of that new character you told me about,” she asks him, half asleep. “Arthur what?”
“He’s not a character, Mariana,” says the narrator. “He was a professor at Columbia. All the people I write about are real. I haven’t made them up. I’m writing an academic thesis, not a novel.”

This snarky little aside also comes off as a wink and nudge, as if the narrator is pulling back the curtain to hint at where his imagination has run riot over fact. He repeats this gesture to Mariana like a confession as though the act of fictionalizing were a criminal one, albeit a valid concern for an academic. Upon learning of a colonist named Leonita that Tannenbaum describes as having been exiled after her husband’s death, the narrator is provoked into a reflection that Mariana outs as a fib. He admits to making it up, he says, to help construct the idea of her character. “The character?” Mariana asks with incredulity. “Didn’t you say this wasn’t a novel?”

The answer is that he’s attempting a thesis in the form of a novel. It feels indebted to the Spanish writer Javier Cercas, whose 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis caused a stir for mixing journalism and fiction to exhume “dead” memories of Franco-era Spain. What Remains touches a similar nerve for Lamela’s fellow Galicians, but the narrator seeks to break out of his predecessor’s shadow by challenging the failures of unimaginative academic texts, and his own dehydrated narrative: “Lately, everything seems false, obsessively theoretical, didactic, far from the real world. The story of Leonita, on the other hand, speaks to something else, about not fitting in.”

The narrator’s desire to learn more about her shifts the gears of the novel (or puts itself in gear, rather) into a travelogue. Joined by his brother, their father, and Mariana, the narrator embarks on a research road trip to the former colony of Ernes. Long after Franco’s colonization program ended, the narrator writes, the site attracted newer bohemian residents who converted the village into a hippie commune. Because it really does exist, the narrator’s painterly observations of postcolony life in Ernes and his encounters with generations of Ernesians filter living color into the book’s previous gray-scale ruminations. But the brightest hue in the book is the bond the narrator forges with his father, paralyzed and mute from a stroke, who humbly accepts his son’s invitation to join the group.

Fellowship and compassion, the molecules of happy endings, do compound into a whole in What Remains. A budding optimism germinates after the narrator relinquishes his authorial hand to the story developing around him. The trip to Ernes is too experiential, its characters too quotidian and carefree, to be fecund for a novel. It is the book’s great strength that it doesn’t have to behave as one. Mysterious Leonita, her fate partially resolved, recedes into the book’s grain. Set against the vitality that defines present-day Ernes, the narrator’s excavation of her cruel fate loses its tension. His attention has snagged on something else: the people who arrive in Ernes by pilgrimage, not force, to partake in the shared dream of communal living. What remains? the book’s title asks. After emigration, after history, after death, exile, and transformation, what remains is life.