Fiction? Non-fiction? A novel? Metafiction? Postmodern? I’m really not quite sure, which doesn’t mean to say I didn’t enjoy it – mostly I did – but it left me feeling slightly bemused and unsatisfied. It’s about a real person and written by a real person about real events – but the author calls it a novel. So…..does it matter in any case? It’s a good read and an informative and entertaining one, and a powerful meditation on courage, heroism and memory. It centres on the fate of Sanchez Mazas, founder of the Falange, who narrowly avoided execution towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, became a minister in Franco’s first government and subsequently a minor writer when he became disillusioned with politics and left public life. The book is divided into three parts. In the first we meet Javier Cercas, keen to find an original subject for a novel, who hears the story of Sanchez Mazas from his son and is inspired to uncover the full story and write about it. The second part relates Mazas’s escape. And the third covers Cercas’s hunt to track down the man who may, or may not, have been the one to spare Mazas and allow his escape. It’s not a great novel in my opinion though certainly one worth reading, especially as it offers a balanced and nuanced picture of men on both sides of the war. Overall a clever (perhaps too clever?) and intriguing read.

I found Soldiers of Salamis an uncomfortable read. It explores a story from near the end of the Spanish Civil War, when a Falangist (Fascist) escaped execution in a forest and was not betrayed by a Republican soldier who found him hiding immediately after and did not reveal his presence. This is a scenario with lots of room for reflection on human values and the ethics of combat—but Cercas' exploration of the subject felt strangely devoid of such reflection.

The Falangist at the center of the story became a well-know poet and government official in the Franco regime. Cercas recounts the details of his life with care, but with little analysis. As a reader, I am, I admit, coming to this title with my own agenda, a conviction that the years of fascism were a stain upon the history of Spain, needing repudiation. Carcas' unwillingness to judge sat uncomfortably with me. This, paired with an opening and closing that reflected on Cercas' own life in ways that felt simultaneously revealing and impersonal left the book rudderless, floating on a sea that was one of the most tragic periods in Spain's history and content to float rather than to strike out in a more precise direction.