Week 12: Soldiers of Salamis

It feels nice to be somewhat stationary in our reading journey as it’s been a while since we’ve last read a somewhat chronological story as most of the previous weeks’ books have been hopscotching across a timeline or across reality and dream. For this week, I read Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, a book built on the foundation of history but with an unknown trajectory into either fiction or facts.

It seems that the author himself is also the narrator which gives us a perspective that’s quite different from the omniscient third-person perspective that we’ve become familiar with in the past weeks’ books. The reader can fully immerse themselves into the book as they only what this narrator knows, nothing less, nothing more. It keeps that mysteriousness of the book alive as no hints are given into the future like all the typical narrators give, and it simply just flows, narrating what is shown. This is the point at which the idea of misinformation comes into the picture, just like it was stated in Professor Jon’s lecture video, that we are given the whereabouts, thoughts, actions of many characters, but which of them are real and which of them are not. As a person who is quite uninformed about the history of the Spanish Civil War, it should be acknowledged that I’m not the best judge for this. I simply kept going, reading the interviews that the narrator was doing and treating it as a novel, which does have a fiction pretense to it. However, the

I found myself quite exhilarated to see Bolaño’s character as it felt like there was some familiarity within the vastness and complexness of the plotline’s setting. It also introduced the readers to a different side of the narrator’s as Bolaño really voiced out his opinions, regardless of how opposing they could be at times. The description that the Professor gave to Bolaño reminded me of another foil character that has been drilled into my head since high school and that is Mercutio from Romeo Juliet! There is no comparison between the storylines, obviously, but that’s a thought that came up that I just wanted to share.

Oftentimes when reading I found myself wondering why there was such a disclaimer note in the first place that the events may be false. Usually, retellings of events that happened in the past that are written as something other than a history book are known to have few pieces of information that may not capture the truth of the situation. Why does the author specifically make the differentiation between fact and fiction difficult to decipher? Is it to encourage speculation from the reader or is there another deeper meaning?