Lord of All the Dead
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Lord of All the Dead is a courageous journey into Javier Cercas' family history and that of a country collapsing from a fratricidal war. The author revisits Ibahernando, his parents' village in southern Spain, to research the life of Manuel Mena. This ancestor, dearly loved by Cercas' mother, died in combat at the age of nineteen during the battle of the Ebro, the bloodiest episode in Spain's history.
Who was Manuel Mena? A fascist hero whose memory is an embarrassment to the author, or a young idealist who happened to fight on the wrong side? And how should we judge him, as grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation, interpreting history from our supposed omniscience and the misleading
perspective of a present full of automatic answers, that fails to consider the particularities of each personal and family drama?
Wartime epics, heroism and death are some of the underlying themes of this unclassifiable novel that combines road trips, personal confessions, war stories and historical scholarship, finally becoming an incomparable tribute to the author's mother and the incurable scars of an entire generation.
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this cleverly crafted memoir, Cercas (The Imposter) investigates the life of his great-uncle Manuel Mena, a right-wing Falangist who died in the Spanish Civil War's Battle of the Ebro in 1938. His mother compares Mena, her uncle, to the pure and noble Achilles, "lord of all the dead," in The Iliad. The left-leaning Cercas, however, contemplates whether he should write about the "shameful story" of Mena's political motivations as a supporter of Spanish dictator Franco. Cercas shares his dilemma with friend David Treuba, filmmaker and fellow Francoist descendant, who accompanies him to Ibahernando, Cercas's ancestral village. There, the duo films conversations with the remaining elder relatives and family friends who knew Mena as they struggle to understand why this "industrious, reflective and responsible adolescent" died supporting ideologies that betrayed the Spanish people. "Can you be noble and pure and at the same time fight for a mistaken cause?" Cercas asks. He investigates how people living in tumultuous times develop unexpected political allegiances and looks at the unintended consequences of those circumstances. Over time, he grows to appreciate the personal and philosophical conflicts Mena faced amid political upheaval, concluding, "I had no right whatsoever to consider myself morally superior to him." While reflecting on his own life and family, Cercas vividly portrays a complex figure.