Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas

The standout Spanish novel of the early 2000’s, Soldados de Salamina made fledgling journalist Javier Cercas a mega hit, selling over 1 million copies, a staggering tally for Spain. Soldados is billed as the Civil War-era "relato real" (true story) of Rafael Sanchez Mazas, a founding member of the nationalist Falange, who was set to be executed among other political prisoners by Republican troops fleeing the fall of Barcelona. Sanchez Mazas not only survives the firing squad, but, in the ensuing search for him, is the benefactor of an unbelievable act of decency in the most unlikely setting: an anonymous opposition soldier finds him and lets him go.

In reality, the book is only partially about Sanchez Mazas, as the tale is sandwiched between the author's search for documents and living witnesses to complete the story, on one hand, and his reluctance to come to terms with the facts once they are all present, on the other. The approach has its positives and negatives. The good is that it forces one to admire Cercas's persistence at putting the pieces together through vague memoirs and interviews with very elderly participants. Particularly impressive is the detective work to locate one of the Republican soldiers holding Sanchez Mazas captive, Antoni Miralles.

However, the introduction is a prime example of Cercas's style getting the best of his purpose, as what should be a brief rationale for writing the book becomes a 70-page catalogue of Cercas's problems with his girlfriend, his self-doubt as an author, and what he ordered to drink everytime he interviewed someone for this book. Am I interested? Probably not - and I wish Cercas would curb some of his elongated, elaborately punctuated sentences (a la Jonathan Swift) into more direct phrases.

Still, Cercas does well to find the drama in the story, and the vignettes are touching: Maria Angelats's lifetime correspondence with Sanchez Mazas even though the two never saw each other after a brief encounter in the forest; Miralles's moonlight two-step as he tries to recover, even 40 years later, from so much needless bloodshed.

For me, the story's most moving aspect - illuminated by both Cercas and Miralles - is that the dead live on in the memories of others, until everyone who remembers them also passes. Thus, the elderly shoulder the ever-increasing burden of the memories of their fallen comrades generations before. Many critics have treated the book as a search for heroism (an ironic juxtaposition since Sanchez Mazas is such a coward) but in a country where historical memory is so important, the concept of true death must have resonated as much if not more than the compassion and awareness with which various benefactors acted to save Sanchez Mazas's life.

Soldados de Salamina is published in Spain by Truquets. There is an English translation available in the US.