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3.46 AVERAGE
3.46 AVERAGE
El autor pone su mirada en un antepasado suyo, un tío abuelo que había sido combatiente del ejército de Franco y que fue abatido en la batalla del Ebro con tan solo 19 años. El libro más que plantear respuestas sobre lo que fue la corta vida de Manuel Mena (pocos son los datos fidedignos que se conocen), plantea interrogantes acerca de las motivaciones de este muchacho para unirse a una causa que tan poco tenía que ver con su contexto social. Sirve también para que el autor acabe con la vergüenza que para él representaba (en pasado) descender de una familia que estaba del lado de Franco.
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
Cercas turn the spotlight on his own family. The fascist past of a distant parent and how his family dealed with one side helping Franco's dictatorship meanwhile the other part fought against Franco.
Sam nie wiem, czego się spodziewałem... może pełnowymiarowej i "gatunkowej" powieści?
A tu JC zaskakuje i serwuje coś w rodzaju familijnego reportażu. I na dokładkę prowadzonego na dwóch płaszczyznach.
Kto czytał "Żołnierzy..." powinien sięgnąć i po to. Bardzo ciekawe post scriptum.
I chyba nie przez przypadek pojawia się tutaj - w bardzo ważnym kontekście - nazwisko Esterhazy...
A tu JC zaskakuje i serwuje coś w rodzaju familijnego reportażu. I na dokładkę prowadzonego na dwóch płaszczyznach.
Kto czytał "Żołnierzy..." powinien sięgnąć i po to. Bardzo ciekawe post scriptum.
I chyba nie przez przypadek pojawia się tutaj - w bardzo ważnym kontekście - nazwisko Esterhazy...
https://jamesvirusdiary2020.wordpress.com/2020/03/29/29-march-2020/
1. How does this cultural product reflect some aspect of the human condition?
I haven’t read any of the rest of Cercas’ work, but I probably will now. He’s crafted a nonfiction novel that doesn’t feel tiresome in its self-referentiality and mix of autobiography, historical context, careful research, and literary criticism. From what I understand, he’s been dealing with the Spanish Civil War in some form in all of his fiction, but this time he grapples with the meaning of the death of his great-uncle on September 21, 1938, right near the end of the war. The first sentence of the novel states the subject of the novel plainly: “His name was Manuel Mena, and he died at the age of nineteen in the Battle of the Ebro.”
I know almost nothing about the Spanish Civil War; as I read I realized that I’ve had it interpreted for me in songs like The Clash’s “Spanish Bombs” or the name of of the British post-punk band Duritti Column (after a Republican military unit). In the United States, only the hardcore leftists (and maybe the hardcore rightists?) know anything about the war, but from what I understand it was a kind of brutal training ground for the various ideologies that would emerge in full flower during and after WWII. I wonder if the nostalgia for the clear battle lines of the war serves politics in the 21st century very well; it’s not easy to see how a situation like Spain in the 1930s would emerge again and the human cost of the war seemed senseless and devastating to me rather than romantic in a punk-rock sort of way.
In Spain, Cercas portrays the war as a dirty secret, especially after the fall of the fascist dictatorship under Francisco Franco and La Transición to democracy between 1975-1981. No one wants to be known as a fascist or a collaborator with fascism, but in his telling, the majority of Spain, especially rural Spain, collaborated with if not actively supported fascism. He maintains that very few of the poor, especially the poor in Ibahernando, the town where his mother was born and where his great-uncle Manuel was buried, actually supported Franco during the Civil War, but they were also frightened of the various communist, socialist, and anarchist factions on the left and preferred some sort of Spanish nationalism led by the former nobility and the rich, preferably but not necessarily democratic, to the disorder promised by a revolution led by the poor and middle classes.
This nationalism was first called “Falangism,” a kind of populist merging of the rich and poor sealed together with the dominant social and political language of Catholicism. His great-uncle Manuel was a Falangist. Cercas had known this his entire life, as well as knowing that his mother adored Manuel as a martyr for the cause of Spain, and mourned his loss as the beginning of the end for the Cercas family in Ibahernando, as she moved to Catalonia after the war ended and raised all of her children in the shadow of Madrid rather than in the protective fold of the small village where she had grown up.
So Lord of All the Dead is a reckoning with his mother’s love of Manuel, and the author’s feeling that his entire career is an attempt to repudiate Falangism and repudiate the provincialism of Ibahernando, where his mother still owns a house that his family visits for two weeks a year to allow her to reminisce about the glory days of a simpler Spain. But as he finds out, Manuel is a more complicated and ambiguous figure, and the history of Spain is less clearly demarcated between the good losers of the Republican army and the Left and the bad winners of Francoism and Falangism.
Not only in the United States but all over the world, a kind of Falangism has developed in the last decade as a response to the failures of democracy to adequately address inequality, especially to address inequality in the context of the financial crisis. As the left destroys and remakes and destroys itself again, and political parties of the left please no one in their successes and failures, the populist right promises a vague nationalism that will solve all of the problems. Lord of all of the Dead reckons with what happens not only when the guns are drawn and the sides are chosen, not only when the fascists win, but when the fascists lose again and we forget about the whole reason why they won because we’re so afraid of them coming back. It’s a book about the value of remembering, and being wounded by that remembrance, fully open to its implications.
Cercas uses new readings of The Iliad and The Odyssey to eventually decide that to be Manuel in the war means that you become Achilles, dying gloriously on the winning side but in such a way that you are remembered forever (the Greek kalos thanatos). His mother will never forget Manuel, even he died for an unjust cause. He used to think that his mother mourned his inability to be Achilles. He wished he was a more active member of the resistance against Francoism and dictatorship, not just a person that chronicled its secrets. But in the end, Cercas realizes that he was Odysseus, journeying to the underworld to ask Achilles how it feels to be a hero, and finding out that rather than be lord of all the dead, all Achilles really wants is to be alive. Manuel, in his telling, was both Achilles to the village of Ibahernando and a scared and lonely 19 year old disillusioned with Falangism and Francoism who questioned the value of war and heroism. Rather than writing himself out of his family, Cercas writes himself into a long history of flawed humanity, of people making the best choices they can and getting trapped in them.
2. Does this cultural product make me more or less anxious about the world at present?
LESS
Lord of All the Dead is not a cheery book, but it’s also not a relentlessly depressing one. I prefer it to the internet. The ultimate takeaway, as I describe above, could be vaguely related to our current problems, but there’s a more generous humanity here that offers a way to at least understand them better. If things get loopy after all of this is over, I’ll have another framework for trying to understand what might happen next.
1. How does this cultural product reflect some aspect of the human condition?
I haven’t read any of the rest of Cercas’ work, but I probably will now. He’s crafted a nonfiction novel that doesn’t feel tiresome in its self-referentiality and mix of autobiography, historical context, careful research, and literary criticism. From what I understand, he’s been dealing with the Spanish Civil War in some form in all of his fiction, but this time he grapples with the meaning of the death of his great-uncle on September 21, 1938, right near the end of the war. The first sentence of the novel states the subject of the novel plainly: “His name was Manuel Mena, and he died at the age of nineteen in the Battle of the Ebro.”
I know almost nothing about the Spanish Civil War; as I read I realized that I’ve had it interpreted for me in songs like The Clash’s “Spanish Bombs” or the name of of the British post-punk band Duritti Column (after a Republican military unit). In the United States, only the hardcore leftists (and maybe the hardcore rightists?) know anything about the war, but from what I understand it was a kind of brutal training ground for the various ideologies that would emerge in full flower during and after WWII. I wonder if the nostalgia for the clear battle lines of the war serves politics in the 21st century very well; it’s not easy to see how a situation like Spain in the 1930s would emerge again and the human cost of the war seemed senseless and devastating to me rather than romantic in a punk-rock sort of way.
In Spain, Cercas portrays the war as a dirty secret, especially after the fall of the fascist dictatorship under Francisco Franco and La Transición to democracy between 1975-1981. No one wants to be known as a fascist or a collaborator with fascism, but in his telling, the majority of Spain, especially rural Spain, collaborated with if not actively supported fascism. He maintains that very few of the poor, especially the poor in Ibahernando, the town where his mother was born and where his great-uncle Manuel was buried, actually supported Franco during the Civil War, but they were also frightened of the various communist, socialist, and anarchist factions on the left and preferred some sort of Spanish nationalism led by the former nobility and the rich, preferably but not necessarily democratic, to the disorder promised by a revolution led by the poor and middle classes.
This nationalism was first called “Falangism,” a kind of populist merging of the rich and poor sealed together with the dominant social and political language of Catholicism. His great-uncle Manuel was a Falangist. Cercas had known this his entire life, as well as knowing that his mother adored Manuel as a martyr for the cause of Spain, and mourned his loss as the beginning of the end for the Cercas family in Ibahernando, as she moved to Catalonia after the war ended and raised all of her children in the shadow of Madrid rather than in the protective fold of the small village where she had grown up.
So Lord of All the Dead is a reckoning with his mother’s love of Manuel, and the author’s feeling that his entire career is an attempt to repudiate Falangism and repudiate the provincialism of Ibahernando, where his mother still owns a house that his family visits for two weeks a year to allow her to reminisce about the glory days of a simpler Spain. But as he finds out, Manuel is a more complicated and ambiguous figure, and the history of Spain is less clearly demarcated between the good losers of the Republican army and the Left and the bad winners of Francoism and Falangism.
Not only in the United States but all over the world, a kind of Falangism has developed in the last decade as a response to the failures of democracy to adequately address inequality, especially to address inequality in the context of the financial crisis. As the left destroys and remakes and destroys itself again, and political parties of the left please no one in their successes and failures, the populist right promises a vague nationalism that will solve all of the problems. Lord of all of the Dead reckons with what happens not only when the guns are drawn and the sides are chosen, not only when the fascists win, but when the fascists lose again and we forget about the whole reason why they won because we’re so afraid of them coming back. It’s a book about the value of remembering, and being wounded by that remembrance, fully open to its implications.
Cercas uses new readings of The Iliad and The Odyssey to eventually decide that to be Manuel in the war means that you become Achilles, dying gloriously on the winning side but in such a way that you are remembered forever (the Greek kalos thanatos). His mother will never forget Manuel, even he died for an unjust cause. He used to think that his mother mourned his inability to be Achilles. He wished he was a more active member of the resistance against Francoism and dictatorship, not just a person that chronicled its secrets. But in the end, Cercas realizes that he was Odysseus, journeying to the underworld to ask Achilles how it feels to be a hero, and finding out that rather than be lord of all the dead, all Achilles really wants is to be alive. Manuel, in his telling, was both Achilles to the village of Ibahernando and a scared and lonely 19 year old disillusioned with Falangism and Francoism who questioned the value of war and heroism. Rather than writing himself out of his family, Cercas writes himself into a long history of flawed humanity, of people making the best choices they can and getting trapped in them.
2. Does this cultural product make me more or less anxious about the world at present?
LESS
Lord of All the Dead is not a cheery book, but it’s also not a relentlessly depressing one. I prefer it to the internet. The ultimate takeaway, as I describe above, could be vaguely related to our current problems, but there’s a more generous humanity here that offers a way to at least understand them better. If things get loopy after all of this is over, I’ll have another framework for trying to understand what might happen next.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Mira que me da rabia, porque creo que Cercas es, junto con Andrés Trapiello, de lo mejor que tenemos ahora en las letras españolas, pero este libro ha sido una decepción terrible que iba aumentando página tras página. Siempre he dicho que Javier Cercas es un escritor inteligentísimo que no solo sabe narrar sino acompañar al lector en su aventura de descubrir el punto ciego de la novela, y para hacerlo lo mismo se vale de grandes argumentos como de anécdotas puntuales que originan geniales desarrollos novelísticos. Aquí todo suena a excusa, petición de perdón... y por primera vez deseas que ojalá no hubiera escrito ese libro que no tenía pensado escribir. Solo resultan brillantes los momentos con Trueba y algún relato de entrevistas a sus paisanos... Hasta el estilo se hace repetitivo y circular cuando siempre ha destacado por ser fluido y natural. Te espero en la siguiente parada, maestro.
It's a book group book, but I'm abandoning it barely 100 pages in. Cercas is a very successful writer in Spain, and this is the first book of his I've tried. Unutterable tedium. Cercas has been considering for some years writing a book about the life of his great-uncle Manuel, dead at 19 fighting for Franco at the Battle of the Ebro.
First he meditates on whether to write the book. Then he has lunch with a friend and they discuss whether he should write it. Then they decide to travel to the village in Extremadura where Cercas was born, to interview one of the few people who remember Manuel. There follows a detailed account of their journey -- the route they took, dropping children off at dance class and football, the cafe where they had lunch ... during lunch they discuss whether Cercas should write the book.
Spoiler: he did, and it's 300 pages long.
First he meditates on whether to write the book. Then he has lunch with a friend and they discuss whether he should write it. Then they decide to travel to the village in Extremadura where Cercas was born, to interview one of the few people who remember Manuel. There follows a detailed account of their journey -- the route they took, dropping children off at dance class and football, the cafe where they had lunch ... during lunch they discuss whether Cercas should write the book.
Spoiler: he did, and it's 300 pages long.
The book took a bit to grip me. But once it reached its halfway point, I, too was trying to come to grips with the concept of telling the story of a man who fought for the wrong side in war. It’s empathy and reverence for family history, even if difficult, helps readers explore the question of how to tell the story of a good man on the wrong side.
Nunca li Javier Cercas, embora me tenha sido dado a entender que é um escritor espanhol bem aclamado. Trouxe este livro de Barcelona devido ao contexto da narrativa, que se passa na Guerra Civil Espanhola, tema que gostaria de conhecer mais.
Javier Cercas, neste livro de autoficção, volta o olhar pela primeira vez para a sua própria família, nomeadamente o seu tio-avô materno Manuel Mena, morto aos 19 anos enquanto lutava pela direita Falangista na Batalha do Ebro em 1938, durante o auge da Guerra Civil Espanhola. A morte do seu tio foi e permaneceu devastadora para a mãe de Cercas. Como Mena lutou por um grupo que mais tarde se alinhou com os fascistas liderados pelo general Francisco Franco, isso foi confrangedor para Cercas e lançou uma sombra sobre a sua vida.
Depois de resistir a repetidos pedidos de sua mãe e de outros parentes para investigar a vida de Manolo e escrever um livro sobre ele, o narrador Javier Cercas acaba relutantemente por o fazer, visitando Ibahernando, sua terra natal, conversando com familiares e pessoas conhecidas do seu tio-avô e explorando os locais de batalha onde Mena foi ferido, bem como o antigo hospital onde ele morreu.
Durante suas viagens, Cercas relê as traduções da Ilíada e das Odisseias nos seus tempos livres, e ao fazê-lo percebe que seu tio é visto como um herói trágico por sua mãe e outros anciãos em Ibahernando, pois Manolo era um jovem idealista estudioso e que esperava estudar direito, mas optou por adiar seus planos de lutar com os falangistas contra a Segunda República Espanhola, pela causa da unidade nacional, ordem e igualdade para todos os espanhóis.
✨“es mil heces preferible ser Ulises que ser Aquiles, vivir una larga vida medíocre y feliz de lealtad a Penélope, a Ítaca y a uno mismo, aunque el final de esa vida no aguarde outra, que vivir una vida breve y heroica y una muerte gloriosa, que es mil veces preferible ser el siervo de un siervo en la vida que en el reino de las sombras el rey de los muertos.”✨
À medida que Cercas vai descobrindo mais sobre Mena, descobre que, no final de sua vida, este estava desmotivado, não acreditava sequer na causa em que lutava, acabando por morrer em vão.
O autor usa a sua morte para demonstrar a futilidade das guerras, que foram travadas por incontáveis milhões de pessoas que deram suas vidas não pela liberdade ou uma vida melhor para si mesmos, suas famílias e seus vizinhos, mas sim para os ricos e poderosos, cujos egos maciços não beneficiam ninguém. Relembra-me mesmo “ Por quem os sinos dobram” de Ernest Hemingway, pela mensagem que propaga, da luta sangrenta com irmãos do mesmo país em nome de uma ideia irrisória.
Ele desenvolve também a ideia completamente verdadeira que nada morre, todos somos feitos de matéria que não se destrói, não se cria, apenas se transforma. Não desaparecemos, transformamo-nos nos nossos descendentes, herdamos as moléculas, sangue e ossos dos nossos antepassados. Escrever a sua história é contar a nossa.❤️
Javier Cercas, neste livro de autoficção, volta o olhar pela primeira vez para a sua própria família, nomeadamente o seu tio-avô materno Manuel Mena, morto aos 19 anos enquanto lutava pela direita Falangista na Batalha do Ebro em 1938, durante o auge da Guerra Civil Espanhola. A morte do seu tio foi e permaneceu devastadora para a mãe de Cercas. Como Mena lutou por um grupo que mais tarde se alinhou com os fascistas liderados pelo general Francisco Franco, isso foi confrangedor para Cercas e lançou uma sombra sobre a sua vida.
Depois de resistir a repetidos pedidos de sua mãe e de outros parentes para investigar a vida de Manolo e escrever um livro sobre ele, o narrador Javier Cercas acaba relutantemente por o fazer, visitando Ibahernando, sua terra natal, conversando com familiares e pessoas conhecidas do seu tio-avô e explorando os locais de batalha onde Mena foi ferido, bem como o antigo hospital onde ele morreu.
Durante suas viagens, Cercas relê as traduções da Ilíada e das Odisseias nos seus tempos livres, e ao fazê-lo percebe que seu tio é visto como um herói trágico por sua mãe e outros anciãos em Ibahernando, pois Manolo era um jovem idealista estudioso e que esperava estudar direito, mas optou por adiar seus planos de lutar com os falangistas contra a Segunda República Espanhola, pela causa da unidade nacional, ordem e igualdade para todos os espanhóis.
✨“es mil heces preferible ser Ulises que ser Aquiles, vivir una larga vida medíocre y feliz de lealtad a Penélope, a Ítaca y a uno mismo, aunque el final de esa vida no aguarde outra, que vivir una vida breve y heroica y una muerte gloriosa, que es mil veces preferible ser el siervo de un siervo en la vida que en el reino de las sombras el rey de los muertos.”✨
À medida que Cercas vai descobrindo mais sobre Mena, descobre que, no final de sua vida, este estava desmotivado, não acreditava sequer na causa em que lutava, acabando por morrer em vão.
O autor usa a sua morte para demonstrar a futilidade das guerras, que foram travadas por incontáveis milhões de pessoas que deram suas vidas não pela liberdade ou uma vida melhor para si mesmos, suas famílias e seus vizinhos, mas sim para os ricos e poderosos, cujos egos maciços não beneficiam ninguém. Relembra-me mesmo “ Por quem os sinos dobram” de Ernest Hemingway, pela mensagem que propaga, da luta sangrenta com irmãos do mesmo país em nome de uma ideia irrisória.
Ele desenvolve também a ideia completamente verdadeira que nada morre, todos somos feitos de matéria que não se destrói, não se cria, apenas se transforma. Não desaparecemos, transformamo-nos nos nossos descendentes, herdamos as moléculas, sangue e ossos dos nossos antepassados. Escrever a sua história é contar a nossa.❤️