As you probably know, I’m obsessed with the Spanish Civil War. There are literally hundreds of novels on the war, and I haven’t read them all just yet. But I want to recommend some of them for those of you who are interested.
1. Andrés Trapiello’s Ayer no más (Just Yesterday) does not seem to have an English translation, which is a crying shame. Trapiello is a brilliant, encyclopedically educated intellectual who is defending the Fascist legacy of Spain and promoting the Francoist vision of the war in this novel. He does it in an extraordinarily talented and highly manipulative way that makes the novel fascinating for a critic and an intelligent reader. I’m writing an article on the novel right now. The novel is not so much about the war per se, as it is about today’s efforts to recover the war’s memory.
2. Mala gente que camina (Bad People Walking) by Benjamín Prado is another novel I will be analyzing in this article. Prado is a long-time antagonist of Trapiello and is trying to dispel the myths of Francoism in this novel. The book is based on the writer’s research of one of the most tragic and horrifying practices of the dictatorship, which consisted of taking the children of the Republicans away from their families in order to extirpate the taint of “Communism” from their minds.
3. Almudena Grandes, a very famous writer in Spain, is creating a series of novels on the war and the post-war period. Her Inés y la alegría (Ines and Joy) is a very curious attempt to inscribe the Spanish Republicans into a neo-Liberal fantasy of today.
4. Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis is a megabestseller that does exist in an English translation. The novel is extraordinarily powerful and highly manipulative in its dedication to arouse sympathy towards Spanish fascism. An article of mine on the subject will come out soon.
5. Antonio Muñoz Molina’s In the Night of Time also has an English translation. The novel goes on and on for hundreds of impossibly beautiful pages, hammering in the idea that the war was an instance of collective madness, in which both sides were equally guilty. As you probably know, this was the favorite idea of the Francoist 1960s propaganda. To rephrase a famous saying about Lenin, Franco might be dead but his mission is alive and thriving.
6. Rafael Chirbes’s La buena letra (Good Handwriting) is a short novel that does not exist in English. In the novel, the nostalgia for the Republican Spain masks a desire for the rebirth of the patriarchal world order. Chribes might be a Marxist (and my current most favorite writer ever), but he is also a huge sexist.
7. Dime quién soy (Tell Me Who I Am) by Julia Navarro is a 1104-page novel where every possible horror of the Spanish Civil War and WWII is exploited to shock, titillate, and sell copies.
8. The Time In Between by María Dueñas has been translated into English. It is only 626 pages long (which is considered short for a Civil War novel) and exploits every convention of the damsel-in-distress genre. The vision of the Civil War it proposes is, yet again, the tired old “everybody is equally guilty.”
So as you can see, except for Prado, all of these authors are dedicated – to greater or lesser extent – to promoting the ideology of Franco’s regime, especially of its later stages in their novels.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’ve been meaning to ask you about your budget for books. You have to read so many as part of your research, and I’m not sure your library would have everything you want. So, how many books on average do you buy a month? For work and for pleasure.
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Yeah. . . I do have this overpowering need to possess books, so getting them from the library doesn’t really do it for me. So I buy. I once calculated how much I spend on books per year, and it’s scary. It’s in the thousands. Books are my greatest personal expense by far. Especially since I order quite a bit from Spain. But I’m thinking that everybody should be entitled to their little vice, and as vices go, this one is inoffensive enough.
I can’t fully achieve happiness unless I place several books around myself wherever I am. Sometimes I just hold them, even though I know I might not be able to read them at that time. This is a reaction to being deprived of books in the past.
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Wow! You have no idea how happy I am to see this post! Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Spanish Civil War and I was planning to look around your blog to see if I could find any good book recommendations. It is so scary, yet fun, to see this as the first blog post! 🙂
Just out of curiosity which monographs about the Spanish Civil War would you recommend?
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Great question! I will write a post with the list of monographs as well.
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I read smtg with my students last month and I thought it may fit your other research project: Juan Bonilla’s La ruleta rusa. It is a short story. You probably read it already, but just in case. It may be a good addition to your corpus.
Great post. I should be brave enough to use one of these novels in my Contemp Spanish Culture course next semester.
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No, I haven’t read it. But now I will! Thank you!
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It can be found online. Let me know if it is a good suggestion.
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So why do you think so many novels take this ideology? Among writers who might be expected not to, like Almudena and Muñoz Molina? This is the cuestión palpitante.
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I’m reading a really great book by a young scholar from Spain who is analyzing precisely this issue. Fascinating stuff! I will post a review when I’m finished.
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Are you sure the Franco lovers aren’t Cubans? That’s exactly how many of my older relatives think, maybe they feel the enemy of my enemy is my friend or that they’d be the only ones getting stuff
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I’ve become slightly obsessed with Trapiello lately, which is the reason I landed on your blog. His diaries are indeed marvelous, as is “Las armas y las letras.” But “Ayer no más,” as a novel, struck me as rather poor. I’m a bit of an anti-feminist, for example, and as such not inclined to see misogyny where it doesn’t exist, and maybe even where it does, and even I found this novel misogynistic, what with its stock villain (the ambitious female lefty academic who will stop at nothing to advance her career; come to think of it, maybe that’s not such a stock creation) and the authorial wish-fulfillment relationship between the (much older) narrator and that young woman, whose profession I’ve forgotten.
In short, I found “Ayer no más” to be a failed novel. Trapiello can do much better, and indeed he has–in his diaries, for example.
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The novel fails because the author is so bent on pushing an ideology that it gets obnoxious. I’ve been thinking of reading the diaries because I adored Las armas y las letras plus it’s such an interesting project.
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There’s probably an intellectual parti pris to the novel, but I didn’t find it obnoxious, and in any event it’s much less of a reclamation project than “Las armas y las letras,” which you yourself say you adored. What I found obnoxious, as I noted, was the novel’s more novelistic elements.
One of the many reasons I appreciate Trapiello’s books is that they introduce me to excellent writers whose right-wing political leanings led to neglect of their work, what with the cultural prestige of the left.
You have much the same in post-war Italy. The left was ascendant, culturally at any rate, and such excellent writers as the anti-Communist Italo-Ukrainian Giorgio Scerbanenco and Giovannino Guareschi (author of the Don Camillo books) were ignored, except, ironically enough, by the working classes, who devoured their books.
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Trapiello is mesmerized by fascist ideas and works to bring them back into vogue. This is not a very hard task, given that Europe is looking with great interest towards neo-fascism.
I’m a professional literary critic, though, and I have no problem separating the author’s ideology – which is frankly disgusting – from his enormous literary talent.
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You are being hyperbolic or oversensitive. Trapiello is in no way mesmerized by Fascist ideas, which you’d realize if you read his diaries (though I warn you that if once you pick one up you might not read anything else for months, if not years). He is merely capable of nuance. Cela was a Fascist. Trapiello is not.
And speaking of professional literary critics, I’d point out that Trapiello, as I imagine you know, dropped out of university before even getting an undergraduate degree. Yet it was precisely he who wrote “Las armas y las letras,” a groundbreaking book whose very existence must be galling to a number of professional literary critics and historians, as it was written by a man not one of theirs, a man who didn’t make a comfortable living in the North American academy, enjoy any institutional support, or have his work approved by a committee. Even now, very few of your fellow professional critics seem inclined to address Trapiello’s books. None has made any evident effort to get his work published in English. In respect of Trapiello, as in respect of so much else, the professional critics, particularly those in the North American academy, are guilty of ignorance or malfeasance (or both). You at least acknowledge his talent.
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“Even now, very few of your fellow professional critics seem inclined to address Trapiello’s books. None has made any evident effort to get his work published in English.”
“Yet it was precisely he who wrote “Las armas y las letras,” a groundbreaking book whose very existence must be galling to a number of professional literary critics and historians, as it was written by a man not one of theirs, a man who didn’t make a comfortable living in the North American academy, enjoy any institutional support, or have his work approved by a committee.”
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Okay, I probably imagined the resentment of your fellow academics, but I’d still wager that in your work on your article on Trapiello you’re not coming across much written on him by academics at North American universities. I can conjecture only that the reasons are either (1) snooty dismissiveness or (2) ignorance. Neither is much to their credit, and neither, to be sure, has much to do with the presence of Republicans in the governor’s mansion or statehouse of any given state. I think it’s also worth keeping in mind that an unsalaried writer in a relatively small market like Spain has a far tougher time making ends meet than a professor at an American university, who, even at a middling state university in a so-called red state, has at his fingertips a wealth of resources unimaginable to someone unaffiliated with any sort of institution. Have you ever tried using inter-library loan at a public library in Mediterranean Europe?
I don’t think it’s because very few scholars can afford to do any research that even the most important contemporary Spanish writers are so hard to promote in the U.S. For the most part, academic research in the literature fields isn’t about promoting the subject of one’s research; it’s about promoting one’s precious self. And while it’s true that most academics have little to no sway over decisions made at the corporate NYC publishing houses, many of them, including many a Spanish literature professor, I’m sure, sit on the editorial boards of every university press in the U.S. Las armas y las letras, to take but one example, was first published more than twenty years ago. How many warmed-over Spanish literature dissertations have American university presses published over that time span? 75? 100? 150?
With a little luck, an English-language edition of Las armas from one of the larger university presses could have found maybe 500 appreciative and informed non-academic readers (or about 499 more than any of those damned dissertations). The only reason I can see for publishing the dissertations instead is that many (not all) university presses function as benevolent societies—I mean, for the mutual benefit of insiders. And that’s fine, really, but then you and the members of your profession should be aware that by operating that way you are forgoing the opportunity to win outside allies for what you seem to think is a struggle for the continued existence of your profession. >
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“I’d still wager that in your work on your article on Trapiello you’re not coming across much written on him by academics at North American universities”
“Have you ever tried using inter-library loan at a public library in Mediterranean Europe?”
“How many warmed-over Spanish literature dissertations have American university presses published over that time span? 75? 100? 150?”
However, I think that you and I are in basic agreement: Trapiello is a writer whose work deserves to be promoted in the English-speaking world. I also believe I should be reading the diaries.
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Yes, on your last points we basically agree. I would point out, though, that Spain’s Directorate-General of the Book, a government department, and its cultural institutions have traditionally provided foreign publishers with fairly generous subsidies that go a long way towards covering the cost of translating Spanish books. I don’t know whether those subsidies are still in place, but they certainly were before Spain’s economy collapsed. >
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