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3.46 AVERAGE
3.46 AVERAGE
Se lee de un tirón. Consigue hacer una historia con la escasa información sobre su tío abuelo Manuel Cercas y con cómo va buscándola. De paso retrata el ambiente alrededor de la guerra civil, de las esperanzas y los ideales al desencanto, las venganzas personales y la muerte. La buena muerte (la kalos tanatos de Aquiles) o la muerte por una causa injusta.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Me atreví con esta lectura por que era algo que no había leído nunca y tenía ganas de probar...Y me ha salido regular. La historia no está mal, pero la narración me pone nerviosa. Pero me gustó el corazón que le pone el autor al libro, se nota que es un libro personal.
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
It's just plain boring. It's more a story about how the author found information about Manuel Mena's life and death, and about his thoughts about this process, than it is the story of Manuel Mena - you get precious little insight into his character and life. The author also tries to force comparisons between Manuel Mena and Achilles, showing that he hasn't understood The Iliad or The Odyssey (I mean, he describes Odysseus as "mediocre" and "faithful to his wife"). He also tries to make the point that Manuel Mena (and, presumably, other soldiers fighting on the side of the fascists) weren't morally worse than others for doing so. Their mistake was a political one, but morally they were right (according to the author) because they fought for what they believed in... what? Surely the cause you choose to fight for is relevant! If you side with fascists, that says something about you morality... The author seems desperate to make a deep point and some unexpected twist, but he scarcely says anything of interest in this novel. Also, the descriptions of battles (in the style of "this unit moved there, then this unit moved over that way") are excruciatingly boring.
I was powerfully moved by Javier Cercas's book which is simulataneously about a great-uncle who is killed in action at an appallingly young age (19) fighting on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War and about Javier's search for the elusive truth. This search is both literal - finding witnesses and family members who might be able to shed light on this young man who has in death achieved legendary status in the family - and an interior struggle that Javier Cercas is trying to resolve having to do with the shame he feels at having a relative fighting on "the wrong side". Cercas's style is not for everyone - his sentences are sometimes impossibly long and he perseverates (with complete understanding of what he's doing) about the truth of details, offering qualification after qualification, insisting that he's not going to make things up if he can't be sure. My husband had to stop reading the book because the seemingly endless going back and forth about the details was driving him crazy. Yet, for me, I found this to be the heart of the book, that we are made privy to the sequence of Cercas's thoughts, emotions, and reasoning as he gets closer and closer to answers. When he does finally reach a culmination, I found myself gripped in grief about his young great-uncle's death. Besides this powerful personal story, it was an account of the buildup to Franco's ascent that has disturbing resonance with our times. I recommend this book highly if you can handle Cercas's style. It's well worth it. I loved it and felt privileged to read it.
A review in quotes alternating the novel and key foundational texts:
His name was Manuel Mena and he died at the age of nineteen in the Battle of the Ebro. It was September, 21, 1938, towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, in a Catalan village called Bot.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
History is written by the victors. Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasise. Only death is certain.
Danilo Kis, the story Pro Patria Mori from [b:The Encyclopedia of the Dead|24874294|The Encyclopedia of the Dead|Danilo Kiš|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1433096186s/24874294.jpg|1479588], translated, Michael Henry Heim
[b:The Tartar Steppe|83017|The Tartar Steppe|Dino Buzzati|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327904364s/83017.jpg|1245179] is an extraordinary novel by Dino Buzatti. It is a slightly Kafkaesque fable in which a young lieutenant called Giovanni Drogo is posted to a remote fortress beseiged by the steppe and the tartars who inhabit it. Thirsting for glory and battles, Drogo waits in vain for the arrival of the Tartars, and his whole life is spent waiting. I've often thought that this hopeless fable is an emblem of the fates of many of those who packed their bags. As many did, my mother spent her youth waiting to go home, which always seemed imminent. Thirty-three years went by like that.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
What I understood then was that Manuel Mena's death had been seared into my mother's imagination in childhood as what the ancient Greeks called kalos thanatos: a beautiful death. It was, for the ancient Greeks, the perfect death, the death of a pure and noble young man who, like Achilles in [b:The Iliad|1371|The Iliad|Homer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388188509s/1371.jpg|3293141], demonstrates his nobility and purity by risking his life for all or nothing while he fights in the front line for values greater than himself or that he feels are greater than himself, and falls in combat and leaves the world of the living in the fullness of his beauty and his vigour and escapes the usury of time and does not find out about the decrepitude that ruins men.
For the ancient Greeks, kalos thanatos was the perfect death, which is the culmination of a perfect life; for my mother, Manuel Mena was Achilles.
Cercas, ibid
"In [b:Soldiers of Salamis|23859|Soldiers of Salamis|Javier Cercas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390344403s/23859.jpg|1283272], you invented a Republican hero to hide the fact that your family’s hero was a Francoist."
"More like a Falangist"
David Trueba (film director and friend of Javier Cercas) and Javier Cercas
I felt that Manuel Mena was the exact paradigm of my family’s most onerous legacy, and telling his story would not only mean taking on his political past but also the political past of my whole family, which was the past the most embarrassed me; I didn’t want to take that on, I did not see any need to, and much less to discuss it at length in a book; it was enough to have to learn to live with it.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
The "nonfiction novel," as I thought of it ... a narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual.
Truman Capote, interview discussing [b:In Cold Blood|168642|In Cold Blood|Truman Capote|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1424931136s/168642.jpg|1940709]
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-interview.html
A literato could answer these questions because literati can fantasise, but not me: fantasy is forbidden to me ... I can only confine myself to facts.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
The model of the journalistic novels by Mailer or Wolfe–Capote’s immediate heirs–has little to do with the model of the biographical novels by Echenoz, Carrère or Deville–perhaps closer to Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, even though Carrère emphatically claims his inheritance from Capote–with the model of the autobiographical novels by Coetzee, Vallejo and Marías or the historical and essayistic novels by Enzensberger, Muñoz Molina and Binet; actually, almost the only things all these novels share is their more or less pronounced will to do without fiction.
[b:The Anatomy of a Moment|13039465|The Anatomy of a Moment|Javier Cercas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1337260595s/13039465.jpg|6683207] joins them in its way. Two main features, if I’m not deluding myself, distinguish it from its fellows. In the first place, its compulsive historicity, its fierce attachment to the facts, in the face of the laxity sometimes tolerated or nourished by the genre, the licence (legitimate or not) taken with reality; this eagerness to be faithful to reality of course excludes the use of invention and fantasy, but not that of the imagination or conjecture, and in any case it explains the scholarly notes that round off the book and provide its documentary sources. In the second place, its determination to combine constructive liberty and the crossbreeding of genres from the primitive novel (the first movement of the genre, in Kundera’s terminology) with the geometric rigour and enforced aristocratic purity of the realist novel (the second movement of the genre), all of which is contrary to the attachment to the realist novel forms that, following in the founding wake of Capote’s novel, in general characterises non-fiction novels.
Javier Cercas, [b:The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel|40130397|The Blind Spot An Essay on the Novel|Javier Cercas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1526457588s/40130397.jpg|48266628], translated by Anne McLean
Handled with critical imagination, [archival documents] offer a reliable way out of the fog of legend and into the clarity of history”
...
A flagrant error inspired a total distrust of documents, a very vivid awareness of their fallibility.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
Illustrious Odysseus, don’t try to console me for my death, for I would rather toil as the slave of a penniless, landless labourer, than reign here as lord of all the dead.
Achilles, [b:The Odyssey|1381|The Odyssey|Homer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390173285s/1381.jpg|3356006]
I should write a story but the story of the story, that is the story of how and why I came to tell the story of Manuel Mena in spite of the fact that I didn’t want to tell it or take it on or bring it up, in spite of the fact that my whole life I have believed I became a writer precisely not to write the story of Manuel Mena.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
His name was Manuel Mena and he died at the age of nineteen in the Battle of the Ebro. It was September, 21, 1938, towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, in a Catalan village called Bot.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
History is written by the victors. Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasise. Only death is certain.
Danilo Kis, the story Pro Patria Mori from [b:The Encyclopedia of the Dead|24874294|The Encyclopedia of the Dead|Danilo Kiš|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1433096186s/24874294.jpg|1479588], translated, Michael Henry Heim
[b:The Tartar Steppe|83017|The Tartar Steppe|Dino Buzzati|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327904364s/83017.jpg|1245179] is an extraordinary novel by Dino Buzatti. It is a slightly Kafkaesque fable in which a young lieutenant called Giovanni Drogo is posted to a remote fortress beseiged by the steppe and the tartars who inhabit it. Thirsting for glory and battles, Drogo waits in vain for the arrival of the Tartars, and his whole life is spent waiting. I've often thought that this hopeless fable is an emblem of the fates of many of those who packed their bags. As many did, my mother spent her youth waiting to go home, which always seemed imminent. Thirty-three years went by like that.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
What I understood then was that Manuel Mena's death had been seared into my mother's imagination in childhood as what the ancient Greeks called kalos thanatos: a beautiful death. It was, for the ancient Greeks, the perfect death, the death of a pure and noble young man who, like Achilles in [b:The Iliad|1371|The Iliad|Homer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388188509s/1371.jpg|3293141], demonstrates his nobility and purity by risking his life for all or nothing while he fights in the front line for values greater than himself or that he feels are greater than himself, and falls in combat and leaves the world of the living in the fullness of his beauty and his vigour and escapes the usury of time and does not find out about the decrepitude that ruins men.
For the ancient Greeks, kalos thanatos was the perfect death, which is the culmination of a perfect life; for my mother, Manuel Mena was Achilles.
Cercas, ibid
"In [b:Soldiers of Salamis|23859|Soldiers of Salamis|Javier Cercas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390344403s/23859.jpg|1283272], you invented a Republican hero to hide the fact that your family’s hero was a Francoist."
"More like a Falangist"
David Trueba (film director and friend of Javier Cercas) and Javier Cercas
I felt that Manuel Mena was the exact paradigm of my family’s most onerous legacy, and telling his story would not only mean taking on his political past but also the political past of my whole family, which was the past the most embarrassed me; I didn’t want to take that on, I did not see any need to, and much less to discuss it at length in a book; it was enough to have to learn to live with it.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
The "nonfiction novel," as I thought of it ... a narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual.
Truman Capote, interview discussing [b:In Cold Blood|168642|In Cold Blood|Truman Capote|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1424931136s/168642.jpg|1940709]
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-interview.html
A literato could answer these questions because literati can fantasise, but not me: fantasy is forbidden to me ... I can only confine myself to facts.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
The model of the journalistic novels by Mailer or Wolfe–Capote’s immediate heirs–has little to do with the model of the biographical novels by Echenoz, Carrère or Deville–perhaps closer to Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, even though Carrère emphatically claims his inheritance from Capote–with the model of the autobiographical novels by Coetzee, Vallejo and Marías or the historical and essayistic novels by Enzensberger, Muñoz Molina and Binet; actually, almost the only things all these novels share is their more or less pronounced will to do without fiction.
[b:The Anatomy of a Moment|13039465|The Anatomy of a Moment|Javier Cercas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1337260595s/13039465.jpg|6683207] joins them in its way. Two main features, if I’m not deluding myself, distinguish it from its fellows. In the first place, its compulsive historicity, its fierce attachment to the facts, in the face of the laxity sometimes tolerated or nourished by the genre, the licence (legitimate or not) taken with reality; this eagerness to be faithful to reality of course excludes the use of invention and fantasy, but not that of the imagination or conjecture, and in any case it explains the scholarly notes that round off the book and provide its documentary sources. In the second place, its determination to combine constructive liberty and the crossbreeding of genres from the primitive novel (the first movement of the genre, in Kundera’s terminology) with the geometric rigour and enforced aristocratic purity of the realist novel (the second movement of the genre), all of which is contrary to the attachment to the realist novel forms that, following in the founding wake of Capote’s novel, in general characterises non-fiction novels.
Javier Cercas, [b:The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel|40130397|The Blind Spot An Essay on the Novel|Javier Cercas|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1526457588s/40130397.jpg|48266628], translated by Anne McLean
Handled with critical imagination, [archival documents] offer a reliable way out of the fog of legend and into the clarity of history”
...
A flagrant error inspired a total distrust of documents, a very vivid awareness of their fallibility.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean
Illustrious Odysseus, don’t try to console me for my death, for I would rather toil as the slave of a penniless, landless labourer, than reign here as lord of all the dead.
Achilles, [b:The Odyssey|1381|The Odyssey|Homer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390173285s/1381.jpg|3356006]
I should write a story but the story of the story, that is the story of how and why I came to tell the story of Manuel Mena in spite of the fact that I didn’t want to tell it or take it on or bring it up, in spite of the fact that my whole life I have believed I became a writer precisely not to write the story of Manuel Mena.
Javier Cercas, Lord of All the Dead, translated by Anne McLean