Joan Sales

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF 2017 A classic Catalan work about love, family, and class during the Spanish Civil war. Spain, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo--a beautiful widow with a shadowy past--puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís's son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city's morale, she leaves to spend the winter with Lluís's brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on "dead" fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini's decision will put her family's fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, an old friend and a traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself. Joan Sales, a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth, and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Uncertain Glory

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary / Madam Bovary

Winds of the Night is the follow-up, published almost thirty years later, to Joan Sales's acclaimed masterwork of the Spanish Civil War, Uncertain Glory. It describes the shell-shocked wasteland that was postwar Catalonia through the eyes of Cruells, a Republican chaplain who survives the war and completes his theological studies only to lose his faith in a world where it seems all hope has been extinguished.

As Cruells struggles to function as a rural priest, his steps are dogged by ghostly figures from his past, such as Lamoneda, a fascist agent provocateur. Against his wishes, Cruells is drawn into obsessive dialogues about the war in which only lunacy prevails, for Lamoneda seems to possess the key to the whereabouts of an old friend—the mercurial Juli Soleràs, whose charisma, for all his betrayals, still holds Cruells in thrall.

A delirious, excoriating performance, comparable in spirit to the work of Thomas Bernhard, Winds of the Night offers a phantasmagorical vision of a traumatized country caught in the vise of fascism.

Winds of the Night

SPAIN, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo - a beautiful widow with a shadowy past - puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís' son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city's morale, she leaves to winter with Lluís' brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on 'dead' fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini's decision will put her family's fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, old friend and traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself. Joan Sales, a combatant in the civil war, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Joan Sales

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