Antonio Munoz Molina, one of Spain’s premier writers, shows his intense psychological and atmospheric style in this short novel, a perfect introduction to this author for anyone who has not already read A Manuscript of Ashes, or any of Munoz Molina’s other works. In the latter important novel, the author’s scope is that of Spanish Civil War, the people it absorbed, and the subsequent dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The present novel (which some will consider a novella), is of a much more limited scope – the life and love of Mario Lopez, an undistinguished worker in the city of Jaen, halfway between Madrid and the south coast of Spain. Mario, almost anonymous in his profession – a draftsman, rather than the architect he would like to be – is someone his wife Blanca considers a bureaucrat. She has, in the past, accused him of “settling for too little, of lacking the slightest ambition,” to which Mario has replied that “she, Blanca, was his greatest ambition, and that when he was with her he wouldn’t and couldn’t feel the slightest ambition for anything more.” How he and Blanca ended up married is one of the mysteries of the novel that develops as the action proceeds in its roundabout way through time and flashbacks, and as Mario reveals his feelings for Blanca, the only woman who has ever fully captured his heart but one he can no longer recognize as the novel opens
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Published in Spain in 1999 and just translated into English for the first time by renowned translator Margaret Jull Costa, Paris plumbs the depths of emotions, memories, and thoughts of the main character – as a schoolboy at the beginning and as an adult in the conclusion, twenty-two years later – as he tries to understand and reconcile serious issues about his father and mother, nearly all of which his mother keeps secret from him. The boy and his mother share an intensely interdependent life since his father is absent for most of the novel, and though the boy accepts the little his mother does say about his father, he also explores on his own and discovers nuggets of additional information about his father which make him question everything he already “knows.” When, later in the novel, circumstances arise which his mother could never have predicted, he begins to question her whole story and all its mysteries. Though some of the mysteries of the novel remain mysteries even in the conclusion, there is one revelation, so tucked away that anyone who skims the final pages will miss it, which changes every aspect of the main character’s life.
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Setting her novel in 1939, in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, author Rebecca C. Pawel carefully recreates many of the elements which led to that civil war and which continued in the partisan turmoil that continued long after that. Sometimes described by Republicans as “a war between tyranny and democracy,” and by Nationalists as “a war between Communists, anarchists, and ‘Red Hordes’ against civilization,” the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) attracted extremists on both sides, and those sides were not always clearly delineated. Because the action, the motivations, and the shifting allegiances are complex here, the author wisely keeps her narrative style simple, moving the action along on the strength of her characters, who are memorable despite the fact that they are somewhat superficial examples of the various factions at work in Madrid at the time. Sgt. Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon, a mid-level gardia, is widely honored by his fellow officers, having been involved earlier in the Siege of Alcazar in Toledo. Tejada often behaves in ways which will be repugnant to readers, but he is also depicted in the confused context of the period. He is brought to the scene of a murdered guardia who was his best friend – Francisco Lopez Perez, known as Paco, a man with whom he had lost touch during the war and whose body he had to identify on the street. Realistic and filled with the kind of details that only someone who has studied all aspects of this war would know, the novel is both a good mystery and an especially readable depiction of an otherwise confusing time of history.
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Many readers will argue that this work is not a novel at all. Certainly it does not adhere to the traditional expectations of a novel, no matter how flexible the reader is with definitions. Begun at the end of the 1980s and still unfinished at the time of author Roberto Bolano’s death in 2003, at the age of fifty, The Woes of the True Policeman was always a work in progress, one on which the author continued to work for fifteen years. Many parts of it, including some of the characters, eventually found their way into other works by Bolano, specifically, The Savage Detectives and his monumental 2666. But though it is “an unfinished novel, [it is] not an incomplete one,” according to the author of the Prologue, “because what mattered to its author was working on it, not completing it…Reality as it was understood until the nineteenth century has been replaced as reference point [here] by a visionary, oneiric, fevered, fragmentary, and even provisional form of writing.” As one character discovers, “The Whole is impossible…Knowledge is the classification of fragments,” and Bolano leaves it to the reader – his “true policeman” of the title – to figure it all out.
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In this unusual metafictional novel of the Spanish Civil War, author Javier Cercas experiments with the voice of his main character and with the form of this novel, which he describes as “a compressed tale except with real characters and situations, like a true tale.” The unnamed speaker, a contemporary journalist in his forties, is investigating the story of Rafael Sanchez Mazas, a “good, not great” writer of the 1930s, who, in the final days of the Civil War (1936 – 1939) escaped a firing squad and lived to play a role in Franco’s Nationalist government. The complex history of the Spanish Civil War in the first part of the novel is slow, full of unfamiliar names, places, and political alliances, but as the story of Sanchez Mazas and the people involved with him unfolds, the reader gradually becomes involved with the action and warms to the speaker’s quest to learn everything he can about the incident in the forest. The scenes near the end of the book, set in a nursing home, are full of touching and emotional realizations, conveying powerful, universal messages about war and heroes from one generation to another (and to the reader) without being didactic.
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