Lord of All the Dead
Javier Cercas
Translated by Anne McLean
Having read it
★★★☆☆
A mostly intriguing read that despite feeling a little clunky and a tad uninteresting to begin with (and somewhat lost a little in its own writerly ways and abilities throughout) did at least paint an honest (and a Cercas family and its connections focused) picture and perspective of a part of wider revolutionary Spanish histories, including Falange, Franco-ist and Catalonian.
A good passage
‘I don’t know: I have the impression you’re less worried about your novel than about what people are going to say about your novel.’
‘You’re not going to tell me that’s not a reproach.’
‘Not this time,’ he admitted again.
‘Look, what I mean is that it’s not books that should be at the service of the writer, but the writer who has to be at the service of his books. What’s this about not wanting to repeat yourself? If you start worrying about your literary career, what suits or doesn’t suit your literary career, what critics are going to say and stuff like that, you’re dead, man; worry about writing and forget the rest. All Kafka’s novels are more or less the same, and all of Faulkner’s as well. And who gives a fuck? A novel is good if it comes out of a writer’s guts; nothing else: the rest is rubbish. And as far as not wanting to take on Manuel Mena’s story, it’s laughable: we go on and on about how this country needs to accept its past as it was, once and for all, with all its complexity and as harsh as it was, without sweetening or embellishing or sweeping it under the carpet, and the first thing we do when the time comes to take on our personal past is exactly that: sweep it out of sight. Fucking unbelievable.’
A second good passage
[...] the cause for which Manuel Mena died was a hateful, irredeemable, dead cause, I thought, thinking of David Trueba and Danilo Kiš or of the end of the Danilo Kiš story David Trueba had told me: ‘History is written by the victors. Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasise. Only death is certain.’ This is what had happened to Manuel Mena, I thought: that, even though the victors had written the history of the war, nobody had written his, everybody had preferred to tell legends or fantasise, as if they were all literati or as if they had guessed that in practice Manuel Mena was one of those who lost the war.