I struggled for quite a while to get into Solders of Salamis. I’m not sure that I enjoyed it completely, but it did give me a lot to think about in relation to history and loyalty and writing.

The Spanish Civil War is one that I haven’t studied very deeply. The little that I do know about it comes mainly from the film El laberinto del fauno and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. Through reading Cercas’ novel and watching the lecture, I think I gained a much better understanding of the different “sides” and their efforts, as well as the role of the Falange. I was a little surprised to learn that Franco was considered to have given up on some of whatever he had initially pictured for the country – I had assumed that his victory meant that it was all achieved.

I found the exploration of ideas of loyalty and heroism in this novel to be pretty unique. As mentioned in the lecture, there seems to be a certain amount of praise for “heroes” like Antoni(o) Miralles, specifically because of the kind of infidelity that they practiced – “carrying the flag of a country not [their] own […]” (p. 246). Sometimes the portrayed heroism becomes mixed with the idea of betrayal, and it can be difficult to tell whether or not certain actions should really be seen as heroic or as anything at all. I think this idea comes up more when Cercas speaks with Miralles: although we never learn for certain that Miralles is the man who let Mazas go, Miralles doesn’t see anything very heroic about the choice – and at the same time, he doesn’t seem to think of it as disloyal. Something about this neutrality on the subject of saving a man’s life was very striking to me.

The parts of this novel that I enjoyed less were mainly the ones about the narrator’s life and insights. Although I’m sure that Cercas’ life story (the fictional one or the real one) could have been interesting on its own, I was much more curious about the book that he was trying to write, and I never felt that the links between the two were particularly strong or significant. To me, even the narrator’s expressions of his commitment to writing a “true tale” and his refusal to “betray” the facts seemed to have much more to do with his deeper issues than with the importance of the story. Did you feel that what the narrator shared of his own life and feelings made your reading experience better? Was it frustrating or distracting at any points?