Soldiers of Salamis
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel of the Spanish Civil War, a modern classic, and a searing exploration of the unknowability of history, by the acclaimed author of Outlaws
In the waning days of the Spanish Civil War, an unknown militiaman discovered a Nationalist prisoner who had fled a firing squad and taken refuge in the forest. But instead of killing him, the soldier simply turned and walked away. The prisoner, Rafael Sánchez Mazas—writer, fascist, and founder of the Spanish Falange—went on to become a national hero and ultimately a minister in Franco's first government. The soldier disappeared into history. Sixty years later, Javier Cercas—or at least, a character who shares his name—sifts through the evidence to establish what really happened that day. Who was the soldier? Why didn't he shoot? And who was the true hero in the story? Every answer yields another question in this powerful and elegantly constructed novel about truth, memory, and war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanish journalist and novelist Cercas strives for a "true tale" in his first book to be published in the U.S., the story of a political prisoner during the Spanish Civil War who cheated death twice in one day. Narrated by a Spanish journalist also called Javier Cercas, the novel is the chronicle of his quest to uncover a story as slippery and charmed as its protagonist, Rafael S nchez Mazas, a founder of the fascistic Spanish Falange, who became a minister without portfolio in Franco's postwar government. Before rising to his position of power, however, S nchez Mazas was captured by a group of Republicans and marched into the woods along with his comrades to be executed; moments after his daring flight, "an anonymous defeated soldier" spied him but said nothing. The facts of this fascist writer's miraculous escape quickly became legend, aided in no small part by the oral and written efforts of S nchez Mazas himself. Sixty years later, Cercas, an inadvertent archeologist digging through his nation's bloody past, unearths revelations and epiphanies that are far less wondrous than the surface gloss, but much more useful to present-day existence. His thematic conclusions are powerful and humane enough to compensate for a narrative voice that is often speculative or long-winded. This work sometimes suffers from a scarcity of scenes and dialogue, but its moral core is smart and compelling.
