In the Wilderness (2005)

Animals have human souls — literally — in the Spanish novelist Manuel Rivas' darkly dazzling vision of purgatory in 1980s Galicia: A rabbit-hunting priest and his poacher nemesis are reincarnated as mice; a crime-TV producer returns as a meditative lizard; a dethroned king and his troubadours take wing as crows. In a series of tightly coiled lyrical vignettes, these furred and feathered wayfarers mingle, quarrel, and observe the struggling humans in their midst, including an embittered housewife, her mute horseman brother, and an artist who turns subversive graffiti slogans into ad copy. Buoyed by Jonathan Dunne's supple translation, In the Wilderness is by turns as timeless as Aesop, as bleakly comic as Almodóvar, and as crammed with unruly life as a Picasso painting.