Javier Cercas

Anne McLean

Facing a firing squad at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist Rafael Snchez Mazas escapes his executioners into the nearby forest, where he is discovered by an unknown soldier who refuses to kill him, in a historical novel that sheds light on the events surrounding a real-life incident. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

A Novel

Soldiers of Salamis

In the final moments of the Spanish Civil War, a writer and founding member of Franco's Fascist Party is about to be shot, and yet miraculously escapes into the forest. When his hiding place is discovered, he faces death for the second time that day-but is spared, this time by a lone soldier. The POW becomes a national hero and a member of Franco's first government, while the soldier is forgotten. Sixty years later, Cercas's novel peels back the layers of truth and propaganda in order to discover who the real hero was. Elegantly constructed and told with self-deprecating, melancholy humor, Soldiers of Salamis is a wholly original work of literature by a modern master.

Jessica Smith

I don't have a lot of say about this but I thought it was a wonderful novel about memory, with the third part being extraordinarily powerful (nicely making up for the driness of part two). To entice you, here is a quote about the war dead, both of Spain and France in their respective wars:

Nobody remembers them, you know? Nobody. Nobody even remembers why they died, why they didn't have a wife and children and a sunny room; nobody remembers, least of all, those they fought for. There's no lousy street in any lousy town in any fucking country named after any of them, nor will there ever be.

I adored it, but I'm docking a star for part two, as well as the narrator being some male writer with the same name as the author with a kind of "bimbo" girlfriend (I don't want to use that word, but her caracterisation was pretty shallow). I will also point out that it was pretty obvious the Kindle edition I read wasn't proofread by anyone after a print edition was scanned and digitised; there were lots of things like "Rosa Krüger" becoming "Rosa Kriiger", "Bolaño" becoming "Bolaiño", accents being randomly grave or acute and thus inconsistent. Also there were weird quirks like "Aragonese" having an accent, thus "Aragónese". I briefly wondered whether the translator just wasn't that familiar with Spanish and had thought, "Oh, in Spanish 'Aragón' has an accent! So my English adjective must surely have an accent on that same letter!" but I mean… surely you don't get to be a translator if you don't understand the orthography of one of your languages (even if it's the one you're translating from). So I don't know. The lesson here is, proofread your shit, people.

Cercas tells the remarkable story of Rafael Sanchez Mazas, writer, founder of the Spanish Falange and minster in Franco's first government, and an unknown republican solider. At the heart of his true tale are the last moments of the Spanish Civil War, during which Sanchez Mazas narrowly escapes death.

Soldiers of Salamis A Novel

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