Spanish fiction in the XXI century

Javier Cercas, Agustín Fernández Mallo and Almudena Grandes draw a literary map of the spanish fiction in the XXI century.

Mezcla, legado, lengua, España, Latinoamérica, pop, Internet, unidad, exploración. Nueve son las palabras con las que se empezaría a escribir el destino de la narrativa de España en el siglo XXI. O mejor hablar desde ya de la narrativa en español como de una lengua común que involucra a 19 países más en América Latina para borrar las fronteras geopolíticas en literatura. Es el gran territorio de La Mancha, como lo llama Carlos Fuentes, con 400 millones de hispanohablantes, que comparten un mismo idioma y herencia literaria que cada día aumenta su presencia e interés internacional.

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International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Javier Cercas shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with "The Speed of Light".
The shortlist also comprises Winterwood by Patrick McCabe (Irish), The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneraratne (Sri Lankan), De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage (Lebanese), Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (Australian), Let It Be Morning by Sayed Kashua (Israeli), The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (Algerian), and The Woman Who Waited by Andrei Makine (Russian).
The winner will be announced on 12th June.




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Spanish Literature

Javier Cercas - Interview

Richard Lea interviews Spanish novelist Javier Cercas.

An interview with a writer as artful as Javier Cercas is filled with traps for the unwary, beset by pitfalls for the unprepared. The literary interview is a territory the Spanish novelist explores at length in his international bestseller, Soldiers of Salamis, in which he drives the plot with a pair of fictional interviews considerably more colourful than many of their real-life counterparts.

The story, which won the Independent foreign fiction prize in 2004, begins when the narrator, a journalist and author named Javier Cercas, stumbles across the story of a minor poet's brush with death in the Spanish civil war during the course of an extended interview with a garrulous and evasive Spanish novelist - an interview which the fictional Cercas finally manages to "salvage", or perhaps makes up. The climactic third section of this "true tale" is set in motion by an interview with a bohemian Chilean novelist, who first tells the narrator that he doesn't need any imagination to write a novel, and later tells him to "make up" an encounter with the book's central figure - a tactic which the fictional Cercas rejects.

Meanwhile, the real Javier Cercas's latest book, The Speed of Light, follows an unnamed novelist, who has recently found success with a "true tale" about the Spanish civil war, as he grapples with the story of a Vietnam veteran whom he met while teaching at the University of Illinois - where Cercas himself spent two years in the 1980s. In the world of Javier Cercas, fact and fiction are never far apart, although this interview is at least grounded to some pretty tangible details: across the table from me is a short, compact man with jet black hair in a leather jacket. He seems a little on edge, but I presume it's the real him.

His self-reflexive technique, he explains, came out of a series of experimental columns for the Spanish newspaper, El Pais, which continues to this day. "I began to write some weird stuff in El Pais, using the 'I'," he says, "and then I became aware that this 'I' was fictional, even in a newspaper. They were experimental, crazy columns, and I began to write in a different way, that some people describe as 'self-fiction'."

So the books aren't true tales? "Of course not," he smiles. "These narrators in the books are not myself, even though in the case of Soldiers of Salamis the name is my name." Read More

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Latin American Literature

Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

Mauro Javier Cardenas reviews Javier Cercas' The Speed of Light.

In Javier Cercas' previous novel, the affecting and widely honored "Soldiers of Salamis," a narrator named Javier Cercas chronicles his attempt to write a true story about a small episode in the Spanish Civil War. Through the recollections of an ensemble of Spaniards, Cercas returns to this episode often, wondering why a soldier of the Republic didn't report a Nationalist prisoner who had escaped from a mass execution. At the same time, a series of motifs recur, over and over, as if trying to attach themselves to some meaning about heroism or war or history, eventually finding it in Miralles, a veteran of many wars who transmutes what precedes him with an unexpected and heartbreaking coda.

Cercas' new novel, "The Speed of Light," follows a similar method of inquiry. An unnamed narrator chronicles his attempt to write a true story about Rodney Falk, a Vietnam War veteran he befriended as a young man at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Read More

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Latin American Literature

Mauro Javier Cardenas reviews Javier Cercas' "The Speed of Light".

In Javier Cercas' previous novel, the affecting and widely honored "Soldiers of Salamis," a narrator named Javier Cercas chronicles his attempt to write a true story about a small episode in the Spanish Civil War. Through the recollections of an ensemble of Spaniards, Cercas returns to this episode often, wondering why a soldier of the Republic didn't report a Nationalist prisoner who had escaped from a mass execution. At the same time, a series of motifs recur, over and over, as if trying to attach themselves to some meaning about heroism or war or history, eventually finding it in Miralles, a veteran of many wars who transmutes what precedes him with an unexpected and heartbreaking coda.

Cercas' new novel, "The Speed of Light," follows a similar method of inquiry. An unnamed narrator chronicles his attempt to write a true story about Rodney Falk, a Vietnam War veteran he befriended as a young man at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The young narrator, an aspiring novelist, has left Barcelona with a scholarship to teach Spanish in the Midwest. His new American peers lampoon Rodney, the department's loner and a potential loony. "[O]ne of these days," one of them says, "he's going to show up here with a Kalashnikov and blow us all away." But Rodney, an "anachronistic hippie" with the "the swaying instability of a pachyderm on the point of collapse," is also the most literary person he meets. The narrator and Rodney start to spend time together. They never talk about Vietnam, but about books, and, years later, the narrator will interpret Rodney's lectures on literature as pointers on how to tell his Vietnam story. Rodney declares: "[A]ll narrative art consists on knowing when to shut up: that's why the best way to tell a story is not to tell it." Read More

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Spanish Literature

Richard Wallace reviews Javier Cercas' "The Speed of Light".

Javier Cercas is a Spanish writer, author of the award-winning novel "Soldiers of Salamis" (2001), which was also made into a film. That novel, set in the final months and aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, explored questions of loyalty and the nature of truth.

"The Speed of Light," published in Spain in 2005 and a huge best-seller there, is also about the legacies of war. Only this time the war is Vietnam.

In an August 2005 interview with the literary publication Criticas, Cercas said his novels begin with a single image, and the image for this one came while he was teaching at the University of Illinois in the 1980s. He saw a Vietnam vet sitting on a bench watching some children play ball, and Cercas wondered, "What was he doing there?"

In Cercas' novel, that real person becomes Rodney Falk, a middle-age war vet who has been forever damaged by his horrific experiences in the Vietnam War.

Cercas' narrator and Falk meet as instructors at the University of Illinois in the Spanish department. Rodney is a big, lumbering man who rarely talks to the other teachers. The two men become friends, talking literature and drinking beer on their off-hours. After winter break Rodney disappears, quitting his job and leaving the university in the lurch.

Visiting Rodney's father, the narrator learns how a bright, talented, young Midwestern kid became a haunted, lost adult.

Years later, back in Spain, the narrator, now a successful writer, meets Rodney again. Finally, he hears Rodney's version of a village massacre in Vietnam called "My Khe." Soon after, the narrator suffers a personal tragedy that links his fate to Rodney's life in ways he could not have foreseen.

Part detective story, partly a rumination on the writing process, Cercas' novel is about the pitfalls of fame and the nature of evil. What he does best is answer, with deep empathy and candor, how the nightmares of the past persist in the living.

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Spanish Literature

The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas

Success as a writer arrives at last - with a novel which resembles exactly Cercas's own acclaimed Soldiers of Salamis - but because it seems so arbitrary, it brings with it no self-confidence. Instead it turns him into a narcissistic womaniser who alienates then loses his wife and child. By the end of his war with himself, his life is as ruined as Rodney's: all he can do now is tell the story he couldn't tell before, and in doing so tell his own. An event becomes story only when someone has a use for it. The writer hopes to validate himself by becoming his friend's voice; he hopes to save himself - from being a lifetime wannabe, a ghost, a moral and emotional failure in his own eyes - by identifying and strengthening the parallels between their experience.

His tone throughout is calm and busily discursive. In his attempts to understand his relationship with Rodney (not to say his relationship with himself) he draws in everything from the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song to a poem by Malcolm Lowry. To begin with, this seems emotionally uninformative. He describes people very clearly - "a Cuban American, well-built, enthusiastic, with a gleaming smile and slicked-back hair"; "a very well read, ironic, slightly haughty guy, who dressed with a meticulousness not entirely free of affectation" - but we don't see anyone or feel anything. And though we know that this is a novel about writing novels, its discussions of fiction soon become as boring as the intellectual landscape of Urbana. For nearly a hundred pages, it's an academic discourse, a book written with intelligence and humour but without sensation. Then Cercas takes us with Rodney to Vietnam, and everything explodes. Ironically enough, though we are now at the heart of the lie of narration, the point where things are at their most written, their most constructed, we begin to travel at the speed of light. As Rodney says, echoing all those grunts so ably ventriloquised by Michael Herr in Dispatches, "war lets you go very far and very fast".

The Speed of Light will vie with Daniel Pennac's The Dictator and the Hammock for the title of tricksiest Euronovel of 2006. But while Cercas has credible enough reasons for encouraging the content to sleep with the presentation, he understands that it's possible to be bored by this romance; and while he's as interested in the fictional hall of mirrors as any postmodern, unlike Pennac he is careful not to be blinded by his own conceits. Forget the biographical conundrum, because that's just a way of teasing us with what we already know about narrators and narration; what saves The Speed of Light from being the template writing-class novel is its humanity. Like Soldiers of Salamis, it's an intricate, male exploration of guilt, monsterhood and authenticity, the impossibility of redemption and the plausibility of self-forgiveness.

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Spanish Literature

The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas

Review of Javier Cercas' The Speed of Light

Javier Cercas made his name writing about the moral confusion of warfare. Soldiers of Salamis(2003) saw him penetrate deep into the psychology of the Spanish Civil War. The novel, currently available in 15 languages, saw its author decorated by literary-prize judges across the world. Now he has an international platform from which to launch this very timely book: a European novel about the personal fall-out from the Vietnam war, published in the same month that the 43rd American President has conceded parallels between the Asian conflict he avoided and the Middle Eastern one he instigated.

The Speed of Light begins in the 1980s. Our likeably pretentious hero graduates from the cynical young bohemianism of Barcelona to an unexpected job offer from an American university in Urbana, Illinois. He aspires to literary success. But he doesn't know how to play the American sophisticate. We cringe for his wrongness, his attention-seeking gaucheness.

On his first night, two of his new colleagues ask him for his view on the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. "Like everyone," he confesses, decades later, "I think I liked Almodóvar's films back then, but at that moment I must have felt an irresistible urge to try to sound interesting or make my cosmopolitan vocation very clear by setting myself apart from those stories of drug-addled nuns, traditional transvestites and matador murderers, so I answered, 'Frankly I think they're a pile of queer crap.' " There's a burst of savage laughter. The joke is on his homophobia. The men he is talking to are gay.

And our hero doesn't learn his lesson there. When he meets Rodney Falk, the lumbering Vietnam veteran with whom he will share an office, Falk asks for his view on Ernest Hemingway. "Frankly," he tells Falk, who is a Hemingway fan, "I think he's shit."

Despite this inauspicious beginning, the room-mates become friends, sitting twice weekly in a bar trading views on writers and writing. Falk's pronouncements become central to the young European's world view. Falk does not talk about his time in Asia, but his experiences of humanity at its least humane add weird weight to everything he says.

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Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas

Reviews of Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis (Soldados de Salamina)

Javier Cercas is a university lecturer and author, whose two previous novels and volume of short stories lacked an international impact. Then came Soldiers of Salamis, first published in 2001, which has sold more than half-a-million copies. It takes real characters from both sides of the Civil War and focuses on Sanchez Mazas, a founder member of the Falange, who became a Minister in Franco's government and a minor writer thereafter. Little attention has been paid to him for his political and literary careers were short and modest.

You can find the full review here.

It may be that there is no category of literature known as "non-fiction" in Spanish publishing. If there is, I wonder why Spanish and, for that matter, South American writers are so reluctant to occupy it.

Recent years have seen "novels" on Evita, Bolivar, Trujillo and other historical figures. This mixing of real and imagined things has produced some great books, and maybe it is inevitable in countries where research is difficult because documents are locked away, doctored or destroyed. But it's a grey area that makes me uncomfortable.

You can find the full review here.

Buy Soldiers of Salamis at Amazon.com

Spanish writer Javier Cercas was born in 1962. He is a novelist, short story writer and essayist, whose books include The Belly of the Whale (1997) and True Tales (2000). He has taught at the University of Illinois and since 1989 has been a lecturer in Spanish literature at the University of Gerona.