Soldiers of Salamis, Javier Cercas.
I want to start by saying how much I enjoyed the title of the book, which I’m not sure if it makes a lot of sense with the story but I still like the way it sounds.
My thought about this book is that I enjoyed this week’s novel and I think that was due to the way the story is told. I feel like I have enjoyed books with actual storylines much more than those that do not have one. Because of this, I enjoyed this novel. Another thing that I liked about is how the novel goes on talking about actual Spanish history and how it is correlated with a story that has fictional things mixed in with it. The fact of including real people’s names and facts into the novel I believe makes it much more interesting as you feel like you are involved in the Spanish civil war, even though the complete story might be fictional.
I also liked how the book is spread into three different parts as I believe that gives it a lot more structure especially compared to last week’s reading which led to little moments of confusion trying to follow the story accordingly. I also want to compare this novel narration to Auxilio from last week’s book. I believe that Javier in Soldiers of Salamis is a much better narrator as he is more accurate with the things that are going on compared to Auxilio. Which as said before is a thing that I liked about this book.
I could see part two of the book being a little boring but I’ve always enjoyed war time stories and because of this, this part of the book was rather enjoyable for me. Even though I liked part two of the book, I think part three is where the whole story comes to life and it makes up for the best part of the book in my opinion.
Going back to the narrator, for this week’s blog I want to ask if you think there would be a difference in the story if the narrator’s name was another name rather than the author’s name Javier Cercas? And why do you think that the author chose his own name as the name of the narrator rather than another name?
“I think part three is where the whole story comes to life”
Can you say more about this “com[ing] to life”? How so?
“ I enjoyed the title of the book, which I’m not sure if it makes a lot of sense with the story but I still like the way it sounds”
This made me laugh because I was struggling to find this book at the beginning of the semester and kept whining about it to my friend. He was laughing at me the whole time about the way that I said the name. I must say, I was pretty disappointed that this story had nothing to do with cured meat… I did not enjoy the second section at all as I felt that hearing about the journey of finding out about Maza’s life was more interesting than Maza’s life itself. Great post!
Hello! The historical aspect of this novel is something that I enjoyed, too. It was interesting to read about the wartime events as well as the characters involved.
To answer your question, I do believe that the story might have been different if Cercas had written it with another narrator. It seemed like Cercas felt a fairly deep connection to the Mazas and Miralles story, which I would guess had some influence on his choice to make the narrator a version of himself; so if Cercas had written the narrator as a largely different character with unique interests and motivations, I think it’s possible that the story’s path and the resulting themes would have been very different, too.
Hello!
I enjoyed your perspective on this weeks novel. I also liked how the novel was split into three parts, it for sure easier to follow with how it was structured. At times, I found myself bored with some parts as I thought the plot was somewhat slow but it all come together in the end!
Yasmin Ahmadi
Hello,
I completely agree with your point about the structure of this novel. I found that it was a lot easier to follow and made reading the book more enjoyable. To answer your question, I think that it was important for Cercas to be the narrator of the story to add an extra element of reality and make us question what it means for something to be truth or fiction.