Book Notes: Becerra Mayor’s Spanish Civil War as Literary Fashion

Author: David Becerra Mayor
Title: La guerra civil como moda literaria
Year of publication: 2015
My rating: 10 out of 10

People keep saying that nobody reads books by scholars of literature but that’s not true. I read them both for work and for fun, and Becerra Mayor’s study of the Civil War novel was most definitely both.

Everybody who works in the field thinks it would be super cool to have somebody find all these novels, count them, list all of their editions, create graphs showing when the genre spiked in popularity and offer an analysis of the graphs. Obviously, everybody is hoping that somebody else would do it because the work is massive.

Becerra Mayor is my hero right now because he did the work. This book of his will be extremely useful to those who want to have a comprehensive review of the field.

This, however, is just a tiny part of what the book does. Graphs and lists appear at the very end of the 456-page volume. The bulk of the study offers a heavily Marxist analysis of the reasons why the genre is so fashionable. The author does tend towards the repetitiveness and heavy-handedness at times but it’s still an extremely useful study.

P.S. My enjoyment and ratings of books have zero connection to whether I agree with their authors. It will be a sad moment when I start to read just to hear my own thoughts mirrored back at me.