Javier Cercas: “We already know the truth about 23-F. But the hoaxes are not going to end, because they are a business” | Culture | EUROtoday

“A 30-year-old boy who believes that the Civil War is something as remote as the battle of Salamis (480 BC). And who suddenly, as he investigates an apparently tiny episode, he realizes that no, that the past is still here. That is what the book says: that the past is a dimension of the present without which the present is mutilated.” This is how the author Javier Cercas outlined this morning Soldiers of Salamisthe novel that modified the creator’s life 25 years in the past. 1 / 4 of a century later, Random House publishes a brand new version of a e-book—maybe—extra mandatory than ever, and the creator broke down the small print of the e-book and its relevance at the moment on the Café Comercial in Madrid.

Published in 2001, Soldiers of Salamisby Javier Cercas, reconstructs an actual episode that occurred on the finish of the Spanish Civil War: the escape of the Falangist chief Rafael Sánchez Mazas after a collective capturing in 1939. The core of the story is the second by which a republican militiaman finds the author hiding within the forest and decides to not betray him. From that occasion, the narrator – a journalist named Javier Cercas – undertakes an investigation that mixes archives, interviews and literary reconstruction to establish the soldier who spared his life. Would or not it’s referred to as equidistant at the moment? “It has gone through all the phases! Equidistant, pro-fascist, pro-republican…”, joked Cercas. “But there is a great truth that we don’t like to hear: great literature is equidistant. It doesn’t take sides. Orson Welles said it: you have to give each character their best reasons. Shakespeare makes you like the scoundrel Richard III… Literature is the most useful, as long as it doesn’t set out to be useful. Then it’s propaganda. In real life you have to take sides; not in a novel.”

literary occasion

The e-book was obtained as a literary occasion and have become an uncommon bestseller for a piece of those traits: it was launched with a circulation of 6,000 copies, however it bought greater than 1,000,000 books, was translated into 40 languages ​​and was tailored to movie. But its success was not solely financial, but additionally stylistic: at a time when Spanish narrative was exploring new avenues after the realism of the nineties, Soldiers of Salamis It consolidated autofiction as a instrument to be taken into consideration, with the creator transformed into a personality and journalistic investigation into fictional matter. A e-book that “inaugurates the Spanish narrative of the 21st century”, within the phrases of the editor Pilar Reyes, who accompanied him this morning, and that aroused the reward of world literature: Mario Vargas Llosa – who modified the course of the e-book with a reward in his Touchstone of this newspaper -, Kenzaburō Ōe, who labeled it as a masterpiece; or George Steiner, who stated it ought to develop into a traditional.

The autofictional gesture—exhibiting doubts, failures, and the mechanisms of story development—influenced a later technology of writers who assumed the combination of private reminiscence, doc, and fiction as a fertile and up to date territory. But past the literary sphere, the novel contributed to reactivating the social debate on the reminiscence of the Civil War and Francoism within the first years of the twenty first century, foreseeing a cultural local weather that may result in better institutional and media consideration to historic reminiscence. “My editor at the time, Beatriz de Moura, told me: ‘The issue of the Civil War is over,’” Cercas recalled. “And it was true.” Fortunately, that modified; partially, because of books like Cercas.

Years after Soldiers of SalamisJavier Cercas as soon as once more explored a key episode in latest historical past in Anatomy of a secondthe place he reconstructs the tried coup d’état of 23-F. On a day like at the moment, the creator couldn’t cease speaking concerning the occasions of the previous few hours: the declassification of paperwork and the loss of life of Tejero. What does the latest declassification of the 23-F papers—by which Cercas himself suggested the Government—contribute? Cercas lowers the expectation: “Little. Most of the declassified papers were known. Some—the most important—were even published. That said, the President of the Government has done a service to the democracy of this country. And to transparency.” And he continued: “The truth of the coup is not going to change; we already know the truth. But the hoaxes, rumors, mysteries… are going to continue, because they are a business. A business for journalists, politicians, historians…”, he reasoned. “We are not going to put an end to these hoaxes, but at least they will have a smaller place from now on.” On the matter, Cercas ended with a essential assertion: “The extreme right once created the hoax that the King was behind the coup d’état. But today that hoax is spread by the extreme left and the secessionists.”

Going again to Soldiers of SalamisWhy did the e-book have an effect? “I don’t know,” Cercas confessed. “But there is a possible explanation, given by an American philosopher: the unexpected success of a book is due to a chance conjunction between the private obsessions of a writer and the public needs of a society. That book came to carry a public need, and that is that in 2001 Spanish society needed to recover its past.” A previous that shouldn’t be forgotten at the moment both.