Monthly Archives: May 2016

Espoir: Sierra de Teruel

From the Encyclopédie Larousse:

Espoir est le seul film de l’écrivain André Malraux, par ailleurs auteur d’un roman intitulé l’Espoir, consacré au même thème.

Montré clandestinement en 1939, ce pamphlet sobre et lyrique n’est sorti qu’à la Libération, précédé d’un commentaire de Maurice Schumann. Plus que d’une œuvre de pure propagande, il s’agit de l’une des premières tentatives françaises (réussie) de cinéma-vérité. Auteur complet de son film, qu’il a écrit, dialogué, réalisé et même monté, Malraux use des images et des sons de la même manière qu’il se servait des mots dans la Condition humaine. Pour lui, le contexte socio-politique est un personnage à part entière. Il prend soin de décrire la guerre d’Espagne comme un catalyseur de passions vécues non pas par des individus isolés, mais plutôt par une communauté déchirée dans sa chair. En ce sens, il annonce le reportage tel qu’il s’est développé à l’occasion de la Seconde Guerre mondiale à l’instigation de photographes comme Robert Capa, fondateur de l’agence Magnum en 1939. En outre, Malraux évite le piège dans lequel tombent souvent les écrivains cinéastes : les grands discours moralisateurs.

Espoir est une chronique dépouillée qui tend à ressembler le plus possible aux actualités cinématographiques de l’époque, sans en reprendre le ton sentencieux. Les faits sont là et les images se suffisent à elles-mêmes, l’une des qualités primordiales de cette œuvre étant l’habileté avec laquelle les documents pris sur le vif sont intégrés aux scènes de fiction pure. La distribution composée d’inconnus renforce encore cet aspect et confère aux différentes anecdotes une authenticité qui sait ne jamais tricher avec la vérité des sentiments.

Cette osmose est sans doute due à la dérive d’un projet qui ne devait constituer initialement qu’un post-scriptum au roman écrit en 1937. Les deux œuvres n’ont d’ailleurs finalement que très peu de points communs, sinon cette passion de la liberté qui allait conduire l’auteur dans les rangs de la Résistance.

See also the film’s IMDB page.

Days of Hope

At first glance, André Malraux’s novel Days of Hope, gives the reader the impression of a novel filled with the sentiments of people overcoming their obstacles, continuously trying despite their failures. Although it appears to be like a glimmer of light, it is something that people aren’t able to control perhaps. I can’t help thinking that hope has something to do with fate because of it’s uncontrollable nature.

The novel starts off in the first few months of the Spanish civil war, the beginning is quite fast paced, which can be seen from it’s narration and dialogues between Ramos, the secretary of the Railway workers’ union as he makes quick and efficient calls to the other stations, in-order to get a grasp of their situation. The sense of urgency can be felt, but Ramos appears to be calm and capable in handling the situation. The format of the dialogues were somewhat confusing because sometimes it was hard to tell who said which line. As the novel progresses, it is told from the point of views of the combatants on the Republican side. Numerous characters are mentioned, as a detailed and descriptive account of their experiences and thoughts during this war are written down, for example their feelings and how they dealt with Guerilla warfare with tanks and the use of dynamite. It is apparent that the fascists are the opposing force in this novel, it mentions specifically Captain Hernandez, who was someone that got executed in the first part of the novel. I believe that it is worthwhile to mention the part where there was a temporary ceasefire between the republicans and Fascists. I think that this serves as a pause and in some ways, is a sign of hope, but not really.

Some of the messages I find, make clear sense and could be applied to ‘life’ in general, such as how “Hope alone, is insufficient.” Although in the novel, there was a clear indication that technology was also important, that hope has to come with effort, the Republicans seem to be running the war based on emotions. How they run things, lack organization, which eventually leads to the downfall of the Republicans. The  idea of losing, hope equates giving in and letting pessimism take over. I think like in most cases, no one really wants war. It is all dependent on the perspectives of each side. Mutual understanding is the first step to reaching peace. It seems Malraux’s message is that the Republicans might lose the war and the revolutions might be lost, but it is for the better because of the high likelihood that they would adapt to the approach of fascism.

 
 

Malraux — Days of Hope (L’Espoir)

Malraux’s Days of Hope is an account of the Spanish Civil War told from the perspective of the Republicans. It is a unique novel in that he does not demonstrate the perspective of the Fascists. Malraux completely rejects the Fascist perspective on the war, and explores the Republican psyche extensively. He demonstrates two sides of the Republican movement. First, the unitive nature of the Republican faction, provoked through their unanimous distaste for the Franco leadership and support for the Second Spanish Republic; and the second, the divisive nature of the Republican faction through political disputations between the Communists, the Anarchists, and the like which in turn contributes to the defeat of the Republican faction.

The first part of the novel maps the battleground and gives a brief overview of numerous characters. It also takes the readers to the battleground during the beginnings of the civil war using specific phrases in Spanish used during the war: “Salud,” “Arriba España,” “Viva El Cristo Rey,” and “Compañeros.” It’s a constant dialogue through the telephone operators, between Republicans and at times brief moments of communication between the Nationalists and the Republicans trying to locate which areas they control. I was overwhelmed by the amount of action that was occurring in the story and could not quite get into the story. However, as the story progressed Malraux demonstrates that the war wasn’t just a battle between the Republicans and the Nationalists but also the socio-philosophical ideas that were unveiled by the characters and their version of the revolution. The conversations between the Anarchists and the Communists and their own ideas of what they should get out of the war gave me a better understanding of why the Civil War was a complete failure for the Republicans.

 

“The communists, you see, want to get things done. Whereas you and the anarchists, for different reasons, want to be something. That’s the tragedy of a revolution like this one. Our respective ideals are so different; pacifism and the need to fight in self-defense; organization and Christian sentiment; efficiency and justice—nothing but contradictions. We’ve got to straighten them out, transform our Apocalyptic vision into an army—or be exterminated.” (210-211)

 

There was no desire between the Anarchists and the Communists to form a unitive structure. It was interesting for me that Hernandez claims the Anarchists have a “Christian sentiment” which almost sounds like he is suggesting the Anarchists are no different from the Nationalists, who had the backing of the Church. It almost sounded like Malraux was sympathizing with the Communists and suggesting that the Anarchists were ruining the revolution. In general it was interesting for me to see how organization, the very thing that unified the Left, ultimately failed the Left.

Malraux — Days of Hope (L’Espoir)

Malraux’s Days of Hope is an account of the Spanish Civil War told from the perspective of the Republicans. It is a unique novel in that he does not demonstrate the perspective of the Fascists. Malraux completely rejects the Fascist perspective on the war, and explores the Republican psyche extensively. He demonstrates two sides of the Republican movement. First, the unitive nature of the Republican faction, provoked through their unanimous distaste for the Franco leadership and support for the Second Spanish Republic; and the second, the divisive nature of the Republican faction through political disputations between the Communists, the Anarchists, and the like which in turn contributes to the defeat of the Republican faction.

The first part of the novel maps the battleground and gives a brief overview of numerous characters. It also takes the readers to the battleground during the beginnings of the civil war using specific phrases in Spanish used during the war: “Salud,” “Arriba España,” “Viva El Cristo Rey,” and “Compañeros.” It’s a constant dialogue through the telephone operators, between Republicans and at times brief moments of communication between the Nationalists and the Republicans trying to locate which areas they control. I was overwhelmed by the amount of action that was occurring in the story and could not quite get into the story. However, as the story progressed Malraux demonstrates that the war wasn’t just a battle between the Republicans and the Nationalists but also the socio-philosophical ideas that were unveiled by the characters and their version of the revolution. The conversations between the Anarchists and the Communists and their own ideas of what they should get out of the war gave me a better understanding of why the Civil War was a complete failure for the Republicans.

 

“The communists, you see, want to get things done. Whereas you and the anarchists, for different reasons, want to be something. That’s the tragedy of a revolution like this one. Our respective ideals are so different; pacifism and the need to fight in self-defense; organization and Christian sentiment; efficiency and justice—nothing but contradictions. We’ve got to straighten them out, transform our Apocalyptic vision into an army—or be exterminated.” (210-211)

 

There was no desire between the Anarchists and the Communists to form a unitive structure. It was interesting for me that Hernandez claims the Anarchists have a “Christian sentiment” which almost sounds like he is suggesting the Anarchists are no different from the Nationalists, who had the backing of the Church. It almost sounded like Malraux was sympathizing with the Communists and suggesting that the Anarchists were ruining the revolution. In general it was interesting for me to see how organization, the very thing that unified the Left, ultimately failed the Left.

Days of Hope

What occurs to me when reading Days of Hope is the amount of variation in ideologies between the different characters. The dialogue hints at a sense of unity among the various Republican factions insofar as the struggle against Franco is concerned, but also reveals deep gulfs between how they would ideally like society to be organized. The different factions of communists, anarchists, and everyone else opposed to fascism mostly all held genuinely left-wing, egalitarian ideals but their disunity and lack of a clear chain of command were what doomed them from the start, notwithstanding their clear technological disadvantages.

There’s a lot at play in this book and it feels like as one reads it the sense of despair and hopelessness that engulfs the characters only becomes more apparent. It’s somewhat ironic considering the title of the novel. The militias are ill-equipped to take on a well-trained and supplied army that has the support of two fascist states with a group of rag-tag peasants and laborers operating shoddy rifles that easily jam. It dawns upon the characters that if they truly want to win this war they’ll have to compromise their egalitarian and anti-fascist beliefs. But most of all they’ll need more technology that they simply don’t have access to: more planes, machine guns, and bombs.

Malraux’s emphasis on the technological aspects of warfare are what put the Republican’s situation into perspective. It all comes down to logistics: who has more machine guns? Who controls the train station? How many men do they have? This focus on technology, and the destruction it can cause, adds to the sense of hopelessness one feels throughout the book. It also helps one see how the Spanish Civil War was a sort of precursor to World War II. Though Malraux couldn’t have been intentionally foreshadowing (as the book was published before the end of the Civil War), he certainly helped set the mood for what was to come to Europe as a whole. The book helps one understand the political and ideological fervor with which people were acting. The conflict brought people from all over, inspired by their strongly-held beliefs, to fight for or against fascism in what they saw to be a global struggle. Spain was just one arena in which it would be fought, and it would overtake the rest of Europe and much of the rest of the world in the following decade.

I also want to make a note about the idea raised in class yesterday regarding the novel as possible pro-Republican propaganda. Later in life, Malraux was the French Minister of Information and then Minister of Cultural Affairs under Charles de Gaulle, which seem to me like good positions for a propagandist. The idea that Malraux wrote this and emphasized the clear technological disparity between the two sides to try to persuade the French government to arm the Republicans seems plausible to me.

Days of Hope

I have the feeling that Days of Hope is the war novel that we’ve all been waiting for (or at least I have). With characters that rise to the challenge of their difficult situations, scenes of combat and tragic deaths (much more explicitly so than in either Réquiem or San Camilo), war-time camaraderie and bravery, a few humorous anecdotes (the soap factory incident, for example) and, of course, evocative and heart-wrenching descriptions of magnificent explosions and destruction, the novel responds to our expectations of what a war story should be (to go back to our discussion of what to look for in a novel from yesterday’s class). Doubtlessly, these expectations are due in large part to Hollywood war films and, in my case at least, Canadian war novels that I read as a teenager. This nature of the novel perhaps contributes to Jon’s suggestion yesterday in class that the novel resembles or approaches a work of propaganda. The quick publication and translation of the novel that Raya pointed out also supports this idea.

The novel does, however, include several elements that I don’t expect from a war novel. First, is the depiction of the bombardment of Madrid. We discussed in class the mechanized side of the conflict portrayed in the book, but during the aerial attack on Madrid, it’s as if the characters forget about the fascists and their advanced machines circling like ghosts above them (present, but not tangible) and the attack is likened to an earthquake, a force of nature, “it was not so much fear of the fascists that gripped the crowd as the sort of terror a cataclysm inspires.” But interestingly, the fact that the machines can’t be easily seen and that they exert such ‘earth-shaking’ damage is seen as an opportunity for resistance: “‘giving in’ never entered their heads —one doesn’t talk of giving in to an earthquake” (365). They may be living in a cataclysm, but it seems to be a cataclysm they can deal with, at least at first or temporarily.

This dehumanization of the violence of the bombardment, in which it is made into a natural force rather than one unleashed by human beings, is interesting taking into account what Jon says in his blog post about the blurred border between what is inert and what is alive, with fires described as “a myriad of writhing tentacles, like a fantastic octopus” (399) and the startled-looking tanks. Maybe to add to this list would be the flock of sheep that flow river-like through the streets of Madrid in the pitch black and carry away Scali and Garcia, “half-suffocat[ing]” Garcia (391). At first, the flock is described as simple pressure, then later a pack of dogs, but they are tipped off by “that dusty smell of country fields” and a bleat (391-392). This confusion brings to light the confusion of the inert and the animate, but it also is an example of the importance of the sensory perceptions, and not just visual ones, in this novel, which I believe was mentioned last class. Aside from helping the reader to identify with the characters and situations taking place, what role does this focus on non-visual senses —the smells, the textures, the sounds of the conflict— play? This sheep incident also suggests a certain invasion of the city of the countryside, or a fusion of the two. The incident is also similar to the formation of packs of dogs in Madrid, giving the city (or reinforcing?) a certain wild character. Is this part of the inert-animate confusion that Jon mentions, or is it something else?

This question brings me to another: Why does Manuel always carry around a piece of a plant or tree? In Toledo, Manuel is described as carrying around a sprig of fennel and later a fairly straight branch (239). In the Guadarrama, he carries a pine branch (354). Is this for giving orders (a sprig of fennel does not seem to be very effective for this) or a sort of talisman? Did anyone else have this question?

 

Days of Hope II

André Malraux

If the problem that André Malraux’s Days of Hope poses is that of the confrontation between the virtues and emotions of human subjectivity–hope, courage, enthusiasm–and a new form of mechanized warfare that puts a premium on objective technological efficiency, this is complicated by the fact that the very opposition repeatedly breaks down. For on the one hand the machines cannot be so easily reduced to an instrumentalized, technical logic. And on the other hand, the figure of the human is constantly in danger of disappearing or of being subsumed into a more general and impersonal landscape of affect. In short, the machines seem to take on a life of their own, while the men (and women) fighting the war have trouble holding on to their appearance of individualized identity.

Some of this blurring of the machinic and the human is a matter of perspective. After all, Malraux shows us the war from the air, a point of view that might be imagined to offer a broader and more objective panorama, but which in practice simply confounds established certainties. Hence when the Republican Flight brings along a local peasant, to help them locate a hidden Falangist airstrip, at first his local knowledge of the terrain proves useless, as he is unaccustomed to looking down on it from above: “His mouth half-open, and tears zig-zagging down his cheeks, one after the other, the peasant was straining every nerve to see where they were. He could recognize nothing” (395). But more broadly, even for seasoned pilots, from the air things take on a different aspect. On one of their early mission, for instance, they see a road “studded with little red dots. [. . .] too small to be cars, yet moving too mechanically to be men. It looked as if the roadway itself was in motion.” This turns out to be a column of Fascist lorries, but to see them as such requires the pilot to have “a gift of second sight: seeing things in his mind, not through his eyes.” And even then, he retains the impression that the landscape and infrastructure itself has come to life as he observes a “road [. . .] that throbbed and thundered–the road of fascism” (86).

But even closer to the ground, the distinction between the animate and the inert is often hard to discern. At one point, for example, during the defence of Madrid, we are provided with the perspective of a fire-fighter named Mercery high up on his ladder, who imagines himself battling “an enemy with more life in it than any man, more life than anything else in the world. Combating this enemy of a myriad writhing tentacles, like a fantastic octopus, Mercery felt himself terrible inert, as though made of lead” (342). Shortly thereafter, machine-gunned by a Fascist plane, he is described as “living or dead” as he “still clung to the nozzle of his hose”–as though the border between life and death had here become strictly undecidable, or perhaps (however briefly) irrelevant. Elsewhere, even the confrontation between infantry and tank, which is otherwise staged as the classic clash between man and machine (for faced with the tank only the dynamite-laden “dinamiteros [. . .] can face the machine on equal terms” [197]), is also put into question. At Guadarrama we discover that “a machine can seem startled on occasion.” Faced with anti-tank machine guns, “four of them–three in the first line, one in the second–tilted up simultaneously with an air of puzzlement: ‘What on earth is happening to us now?’” (310).

And at the Battle of Teruel, things are further complicated by the deployment of a loud-speaker, a machine that talks: “inert, yet alive because it spoke” (381). Later, as the noise of battle dies down, it is described in personifying terms: “the loud-speaker had been waiting for this lull” (384). More generally, the technology of mass reproduction–represented here by cartoon characters such as “Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Donald Duck” (368)–conjure up “the modern fairyland, the world in which those who are killed all come back to life” (369). Technology both brings to humanity death and destruction but also offers the world forms of (re)animation that trouble the very distinction between human and inhuman, living and dead.

If then the machines increasingly take on a life of their own, what distinguishes the human? At the best in the novel, the men and women who populate it eke out a fairly shadowy and precarious existence. Again, this is partly a function of the recurring aerial perspective: from on high or far off, people either disappear are easily dehumanized, for instance (in the case of deserters going over to the enemy) appearing to be no more than “insects waving their antennae” (305) or (in the case of Fascists flushed out of the forest) adopting “the same panic-stricken scamper as the herd of cattle they had just stampeded” (398). Again, however, even on the ground they tend to dissolve into the environment: “shadows,” “ghosts,” “wraiths,” and “shadowy forms” in the Madrid mist, for example (265, 266, 267, 270); or collectively constituting “a frenzied mass” (204) or a “panic-stricken mob [. . .] like leaves whirled together and then dispersed by the wind” (225). Even in terms of the novel’s own representational strategy, which constantly jumps between locations and discrete episodes, there is little attempt to give many of the characters much realist depth or rounded individuality; they tend simply to incarnate particular positions or singular attitudes, becoming spokespeople for (say) Anarchism or Communism, or exemplary instantiations of stubbornness or self-sacrifice.

If there is something that, for Malraux, can (still) be said to be distinctly human, it is perhaps the face. This perhaps is why the novel repeatedly recurs to the human face, and to the notion that the face somehow stands in for individual character (men are variously described, for instance, in terms of a “jovial solid-looking jowl” [9] or a “predatory face, hook nose, and twinkling eyes” [18] and so on), and also more generally for shared humanity. In an atmosphere frequently characterized by gloom and indiscernibility, Malraux often has faces suddenly revealed or lit up, as for instance when an explosion at Toledo catches a group of dinamiteros “open mouthed, their cheeks lit by the livid purplish sheen of flame and moonlight mingled [such that] each saw the face that he would wear in death” (199). Or when an aeroplane is caught in a searchlight and “a sense of comradeship in arms pervaded the cabin flooded with menacing light; now for the first time since they began the flight, these men could see each other” (234; emphasis in original) and as a result, in the aftermath, each of the crew “had vividly before him the picture of the features of his comrade as they had been thrown into relief for that brief moment” (235). There is something about the face of the other that gives us both his (or her) truth, and reminds us of some shared commonality.

Except, of course, that warfare also destroys the face and our perception of it. On the one hand, the novel repeatedly gives us instances of blindness, either permanent or temporary, which make it impossible to see the face. And the face of the blind is also somehow grotesque, we are told: the father of the blinded airman Jaime tells us that he “can’t bear to look at his face” (279). But war also mutilates its victims such that there is no face to be seen. This is what happens to Gardet, another airman, whose plane crashes towards the end of the book: his face is “slashed wide open from ear to ear. The lower part of the nose was hanging down.” As a result, would-be rescuers flee from the sight, and Gardet muses “If I look at my mug just now, I’ll kill myself” (409). Even bandaged up, the effect is that of “a tragic bas-relief of Armageddon” (411).

Throughout, then, Malraux tries to maintain the distinction between human and machine (as well as between the human and he animal), but ultimately the war puts such differences into question. More likely, we end up with a variety of hybrid combinations of man, machine, and nature, in which what is presumptively object is animated and gains features of subjectivity (such as affect and agency), while men and women defer or abdicate some part of their subjectivity as they take up their places in the “endless flux of things” (423). Sometimes these hybrids are empowering, as with the case of the pilot who “feel[s] the contact of the stick, welded to the body, identified with it” (401). Sometimes they are grotesque, as with the battering ram used at the siege of the Montaña Barracks, a “strange geometrical monster” (32) wielded by men on either side of it, one of whom dies under fire and “slump[s] across the moving beam, arms dangling on one side, legs on the other. Few of his companions noticed him; the battering-ram continued lumbering slowly forward, with the dead body riding it” (33). Here, man and machine, animate and inanimate, dead and alive all come to constitute a collective apparatus of war in which any categorical distinctions are untenable if not irrelevant. This complicates any notions of fraternity. Yet such is modern warfare. And in so far as war teaches us how to live (Manuel, perhaps the novel’s major character, tells us that “a new life started for me with the war” [428]), it is also, quite simply, modern life.

See also: Days of Hope I; Spanish Civil War novels.

Sobre Days of Hope

Reading Malraux for me has been a very different experience than that of reading Sender and Cela for a number of reasons, most of which are obvious, but nevertheless worth mentioning in my opinion. The first and most obvious reason why my reading of this text has been different from the previous two texts is that it is in English. Even though English is my native language, over the past six years I’ve grown accustomed to reading almost exclusively Spanish literature, and every once in a while I find that switching back to literature in my native language can be tricky, for whatever reason.

The second reason why my reading of the Malraux has been different than that of the Sender and Cela is that it is not just a work in translation (from French to English), but I’m very aware of the fact that it is so. Having just taken a course in translation studies theory, I approached this text with a different perspective than I might have otherwise, had I not taken that course. Even though I cannot speak or read French (and therefore cannot compare this English translation to the French original), the Malraux to me reads like a translation. It’s not all that evident at first glance, but there were several times during my reading that I felt the English rendition was awkward (again, even though I can’t compare it to the French original). What’s more, not only is the Malraux a translation from French to English, but that very English is the English of the late 30s (the translation in English was published the same year as the original was published in French, in 1938), which of course is going to read differently from the contemporary English we use today. Either way, despite it being in English, I do get a sense of foreignness from this novel, but a foreignness different from that which I experience reading a Spanish text. Not only is the English foreign to me, but it feels “foreign” or perhaps odd reading about happenings in “Civil War”-Spain in English, especially after having just read Sender and Cela.

Despite these (and other) differences I’ve noticed between my reading of those two and Malraux’s text, there are also several things I felt these “Civil War” accounts had in common. Perhaps the most pointed recurring theme is the sense of ambiguity and ambivalence that we’ve been able to tease out of the various characters’ experiences of the events. In the Sender, we saw how the cura’s very faith was challenged in the face of Paco’s life being at stake. In the Cela, we saw throughout the confusing narrative how characters were ambivalent towards the idea of fate. And in the Malraux, as Jon further elaborates in his interesting reflection on the first part, we are confronted with the idea of hope and its inherent ambivalence, how hope in and of itself both “resists and recognizes doubt.”

These and similar musings of mine reminded me of our discussion from last class, about whether these authors we’re reading present us with a choice or not as to the right or wrong, the blame, the justification, of the war. It’s interesting to me, then, that despite the fact that all three texts acknowledge the ambiguous nature of the war and the ambivalence of those affected by it, each text ultimately presents a distinct reading or “take-away” of the events they portray therein. I think there was a general consensus about the Sender leaving no room for interpretation, with Cela doing the exact opposite and leaving the question of the blame for the war (among other matters) open to interpretation. I’m interested to see what people think about the Malraux once we’ve finished it for this Thursday.

Primera memoria

Matute, Primera Memoria

In Ana María Matute’s Primera memoria, the civil war is doubly displaced. In the first instance, the novel is set entirely on an island in the Balearics, so while the conflict rages on the mainland, news comes only indirectly via the newspapers and the radio. In the island’s atmosphere of “hypocritical peace,” the conflict comes to seem ghostly or “phantasmatic: far away and close up at the same time, perhaps more fearful because it couldn’t be seen” (15). The narrator, a fourteen-year old girl named Matia, finds herself stranded there as she is visiting her grandmother when hostilities break out. A brief vacation turns into months of isolation in a world she doesn’t fully understand. Second, Matia’s sense of distance from both her surroundings and the war is exacerbated by her youth. Her extended stay coincides with a point of transition as she hovers on the threshold of adulthood but has yet quite to put childish things aside. The war is most certainly an adult affair and Matia has her own preoccupations as she is forced to study alongside her fifteen-year-old cousin, Borja, who with his mother (Matia’s aunt) is likewise unable to return to the mainland. Their tutor is an ex-seminarian, not much older than them, called Lauro. The two of them escape from their family and Lauro as often as they can, to indulge in all the usual activities of coming of age and extended vacations: idling, smoking, drinking, conspiring, exchanging confidences in hushed tones, and fighting and finding love with the local youths. All this leaves little time to worry too much about the war’s progress.

And yet, distant and displaced as it is, the war pervades everything. There is a marked sense of tension throughout the island, and an undercurrent of violence and hatred. The young people have their own war among themselves, which pits them against each other along battle lines that clearly inscribe class difference: young Borja, future inheritor of his grandmother’s estate, ropes in on his side not only his cousin Matia but also the local doctor’s son and the children of his grandmother’s majordomo; against them are arrayed a ragtag group of kids from the local village, including the sons of the blacksmith, the carter, the carpenter, and the washerwoman. But their conflict also invokes older enmities, as they scrap on the site where years before the island’s Jews had been burned alive. Cruelty and suspicion are all around, as if burned into the landscape by the harsh and unforgiving sun.

It is just that the conflict remains mostly repressed, a matter of rumour and innuendo. But if the truth were told, the lines of alliance and enmity would be more complicated than they first appear. Matia’s and Borja’s fathers, both fighting on the mainland, are ranged on opposite sites of the conflict: the one a Republican, the other a colonel with the fascist forces who (Borja proudly boasts) “can order whoever he feels like to be shot by a firing squad” (58). What’s more, when Matia and Borja come across a dead body, a man shot by the local bully boys for supposedly being a “red,” it slowly emerges that the victim’s family is strangely entwined with their own. His son, Manuel, may well be Borja’s half-brother, both of them (Manuel knows and Borja likes to think) bastard offspring of a distant and somewhat mysterious relative, Jorge de Son Major, who has broken off from the family and is now a semi-recluse who shelters behind his property’s high walls, attended to only by an aged retainer. The kids pluck up their courage and visit, hoping perhaps for some kind of resolution, but inside the walled garden all they find is further confusion and mockery: a hall of mirrors in which nothing is quite as it seems and Jorge urges a parody of matrimony on Matia and Manuel while the retainer (Matia thinks) “poison[s]” them with his guitar music. No wonder that Matia should conclude that the “pathetic grown-ups” are “dirty and kitsch” (154), and that she should cling on to childhood (her doll, fairy stories) as long as possible.

So the truth will not be told. The novel ends with a dramatic scene of confession and revelation that in fact serves only to muddy the waters still further. Meanwhile, Borja effectively blackmails both Lauro and Matia, in his cousin’s case by threatening to denounce something that isn’t in fact true, but that is perhaps all the more believable as Matia herself has been trying to get Borja to believe it. As a result, Matia becomes complicit in the expulsion of her friend Manuel from the island. This is a punishment that, given the ill will and malice that infect the place, might almost be taken to be a liberation. But Lauro’s fate indicates otherwise: as Borja and Matia’s long vacation finally comes to an end, he enlists in the army only (we are told by a narrative voice that occasionally interjects to indicate that all this is a memory from long ago) to be killed at the front just a month later. There seems little chance of relief in this novel marked by claustrophobia, fear, suspicion, hysteria, malice, and hatred.

However much the children are repeatedly escaping–they avoid the war by being on the island; they slip away from their lessons and from their imperious grandmother–they end up all the more tangled up in everything. Displacement is an illusion, if it doesn’t just make things worse. This is a bleak book, and while you may want to applaud its refusal to indulge in the kind of moralizing search for heroes that mars other narratives of the war, when you realize that it’s merely the first in a trilogy you have to hope that things get better in the subsequent volumes. But the fact that their titles are Los soldados lloran de noche (Soldiers Cry by Night) and La trampa (The Trap) suggests that they probably don’t.

See also: Spanish Civil War novels.

Malraux – Days of Hope (L’espoir)

Malraux’s Days of Hope is a far-reaching, albeit fictitious, account of the Spanish civil war told through the perspectives of various combatants of the Republican side throughout the conflict. It is far-reaching in that the novel hops from character to character, detailing the varying experiences and thoughts of each, from town fighting, to life at the aerodrome, aerial skirmishes, guerilla warfare with tanks and dynamite, flamethrowers, and commonplace executions by firing squad. Casualties are described in great detail. As such, because of the character hopping, there is no clear protagonist, where the author stays only long enough with one character so that the reader gains a basic understanding of his thoughts, and simply moves on to the next and does the same; the antagonists are the fascists. Such characters include captain Hernandez, who is executed at the end of part 1, Colonel Magnin (a French pilot), Manuel (an Anarchist I believe), Garcia (a professor turned officer), Golovkin (a Russian pressman), Sibirsky (a mercenary), the Negus, Slade, and more. Who exactly is the Negus?

In part 1, the Republicans lay failed sieges on the fortress of Toledo and on Alcazar; also, a temporary ceasefire is organized at Alcazar between the Republicans and Fascists, where soldiers exchange goods and mail.

 

The story was rather difficult to read at times because of the transitory nature of the book, flitting from character to character in a way that could be hard to follow, especially when trying to match dialogue with the corresponding person who said it and dialogue fragments follow each other in rapid succession. In addition, certain characters have odd syntax to represent regionalisms. However, there were many memorable quotes from the story as well that effectively captured the zeitgeist of the war era. One scene that struck me was when the Republican soldiers came to a town and asked why the villagers had burned a church down when instead they could have used it as a school to replace their substandard existing one. To which a peasant replied: “Well, my kids – they’re my kids aren’t they? – and it can be main cold here in the winter. But sooner than have my children in that there building, I’d see ‘em frozen stiff!” The peasants expressed that the church was sponsoring a Holy War against them, and their distaste for the clergy stemmed from the clergy’s support for the fascists, and their spurning of the poor in favour of the upper class. Such was the peasant’s contempt for them that even the vestiges of their presence could not remain. Another particularly interesting scene was during the ceasefire, when soldiers from opposing sides approached each other, and finally produced some much-anticipated dialogue between the two parties to gain a better understanding of why everyone was fighting. We realize that both sides are fighting for their own ideals, ideals that they actually believe in, and the conflict is not as simple as good versus evil as commonly portrayed in their media.