Our war. Still pending acts of contrition, politically and literary. A civil war transferred so many times to Spanish literature. And it never hurts a new perspective, a different approach.
Flags in the mist is that, a story about the Spanish Civil War treated from the biography of real characters, brushstrokes under the exquisite narrative voice of the author.
At this point it is not a question of considering which author writes the best novel or literary work on this dismal time. There we have Lorenzo Silva o Javier Fences, with his novels about the war taken a few days ago ...
The important thing is the sum, the collection of creation, ingenuity and imagination so that what happened in the war transcends fundamentally, in the human, beyond war parts or dates of battles.
Writers are always in debt to something in order to continue writing. They are obliged to narrate the present, the past and the future. But always from the perspective of some characters that we, the readers, are going to be, so that we can live it all and end up empathizing with our world, either through real or invented characters.
In this case, Flags in the mist tells us about the ideals, the starting points that motivate the two characters representing both factions. Bullfighter Jose Garcia Carranza, actively involved with the national insurgents and died on December 30, 1936 and the communist brigadista John cornford, died December 28, 1936.
Two days apart separate the deaths of these two characters. Parallel destinations, very different in their journey, but almost traced in their completion.
An interesting proposal in which Javier Reverte gives a voice to these two active participants in the war. And in which a doubt transcends: what is there of real will in the fact that two young people go to war in search of death?
You can now get Flags in the Mist, the latest book by Javier Reverte, here:
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