The thing is, I was expecting a travelogue. After all, that was the implied content, given the subtitle of the book, Traveling in a country, where there is nothing. And in the beginning, I did learn a lot of things. I learned about Spain, about its geographical distribution. I learned about how Spain is actually a doughnut, so to speak. The majority of the population is distributed in the middle (Madrid) and in its coastal areas. But with regards to the interior, it is very sparsely populated. And this book is essentially an anthropological and sociological study of this area of Spain, where there is nothing, where people constantly move away to move to the cities, and where the population eventually disappears, and villages vanish.
I did learn a bit of interesting things, but perhaps the things I didn't like were the very long and elaborate detours. At some point, there were long chapters about Spanish movies, and sometimes I lost why it was even relevant in the first place to the original theme of the book. There were passages about King Kong and Godzilla, about how these monsters were associated with the provinces and the interior. And at some point, the topic even shifted to Argentina and how everyone and their grandmother were in Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina was essentially the interior.
I suppose this was a very interesting study of population decline and the sociological factors that cause it. But at the same time, as I was expecting something that was a bit different, this came to be too intellectual for me, and wasn't really the topic I was looking for.
In any case, it was an interesting and educational book, however this was not what I was expecting. I give it 3 out of 5 stars.
See my other book reviews here.
