Nine titles about the Spanish Civil War

Julian Zabalbeascoa's fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Ploughshares, among other journals. He divides his time between Boston and the Basque Country in Spain.

What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is Zabalbeascoa's first novel.

At Electric Lit the author tagged nine books -- memoirs and novels that can be found in English -- about Spain’s bloody civil war that served as a dress rehearsal for World War II. One title on the list:

Lord of All the Dead by Javier Cercas, translated by Anne McLean

In Lord of All the Dead, Javier Cercas returns to the subject of Spanish Civil War. In his surprising break-out novel Soldiers of Salamis, Cercas documents his attempt (or the attempt of a character with the name Javier Cercas) to tell the story of a Falangist soldier who narrowly escapes being executed by firing squad at the end of the Spanish Civil War, while searching for the Republican soldier who allowed this escape. The exhumation of the past hums along, stalls, hits a wall, then receives help from none other than Roberto Bolaño. In Lord of All the Dead, Javier Cercas (or, again, a character with the name Javier Cercas) tries once more exhuming the story of a soldier from the Spanish Civil War. This time it is the story of Manuel Mena, the great-uncle to both Javier Cercases, who falls under the sway of fascist ideas and enlists at the age of 17. He will die two years later during the Battle of the Ebro. Cercas knows little else of this man whose absence created a lacuna in the family. With Lord of All the Dead, he repeatedly tries and fails to fill it in and to understand why his great-uncle was willing to die fighting for an unjust cause, “for interests that weren’t even his.” Cercas receives assistance from the filmmaker David Trueba, who adapted Soldiers of Salamis for the screen and directed the film and who has also recently lost his wife to a very handsome and very famous actor (the identity is revealed late in the novel). As with Bolaño in Soldiers of Salamis, Trueba prods Cercas along. “We don’t judge Achilles by the justice or injustice of the cause he died for,” Trueba tells Cercas, “but for the nobility of his actions, by the decency and bravery and generosity with which he behaved. Should we not do the same with Manuel Mena?…Look, Manuel Mena was politically mistaken, there’s no doubt about that; but morally…would you dare to say you’re better than him? I wouldn’t.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue