Week Eleven: Javier Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis

This week, the assigned book was Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas. To be completely honest, I started this book very confused. I wasn't quite sure whether or not this book was a work of fiction or a biographical re-telling of true events. After watching the lecture video and doing some googling, I finally understood that it was a sort of mix of both, a historical fiction about real people that existed and real events that happened. When I went into this book, I went in without much knowledge on the history of Spain and its civil war. This text kind of forced me to do some learning about Southern Europe in the 1900s to understand the context that lies behind this story. 

As we near the end of this semester, I can see how there are a few major literary themes that have been consistently present in the texts that we read in the beginning, all the way to now. One of these major themes is memory and its significance in storytelling. From Proust, Paris Peasant, The Shrouded Woman, W or the Memory of Childhood to Soldiers of Salamis, the importance of memory is a recurring topic. In the first part of Soldiers of Salamis, the narrator, who is a journalist, attempts to hunt down the details of the story behind the escape of Sanchez Mazas from a firing squad. Throughout this hunt, he ends up meeting various people who are distantly connected to Sanchez Mazas. The narrator is always questioning the truth and the reliability of the accounts that are told to him. There is also one moment where he wonders whether the tales that people remember are what actually happened, or simply the memorized script that has become reality just out of having been recited so many times. 

Here is a quote that I liked: "[...] I also decided that the book I'd write would not be a novel, but simply a true tale, a tale cut from the cloth of reality, concocted out of true events and characters, a tale centered on Sanchez Mazas and the firing squad and the circumstances leading up to and following it. This quote stood out because I think it represents a merge of the narrator's journalistic drive and desire to be a "real" writer. It summarizes his obsession with uncovering the true events and his desire to put it together into a written tale. 

Here is my question for this week: Why was the narrator so intent on finding out the exact truth of this story?

Comments

  1. XyrusMarch 28, 2022 at 9:24 PM

    I believe at some point, the narrator fell in love with Mazas's history and continued to be curious while at the same discovering the missing piece to his writing. He benefited from his searching's, and he got to also share a story that should of been long forgotten.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jennifer NagtegaalMarch 28, 2022 at 9:26 PM

    Thanks for your post! I see some potential tags from much of the interesting content here... (truth, reality, memory, Spain, Civil War...)

    ReplyDelete
  3. JonMarch 28, 2022 at 10:08 PM

    "I started this book very confused. I wasn't quite sure whether or not this book was a work of fiction or a biographical re-telling of true events."

    As I say in the lecture, you should look at the warning on the copyright page... but perhaps this doesn't help?

    ReplyDelete

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