9 “Aquí no hay nadie”: Writing, Reading, Knowing in Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina

The final silence described in Luis Martín Santos’s Franco-era classic, Tiempo de silencio [Time of Silence] (1961), is the silence of thought. Success for the failed medical researcher, Pedro, depends on the cessation of brain activity, numbing the pain of a necessary submission to a hot-handed executioner (“dame la vuelta que por este lado ya estoy tostado” [give me a turn for on this side I’m already quite toasted] [295]). Play the country doctor, hunt pheasant, set up the chess board, bide your time, marry a pretty village girl, multiply and replenish the Spanish earth. In the time of silence imposed by the Francoist dictatorship, Pedro has learned, “todo consiste en estar callado” [it’s just a question of keeping quiet] (293). Listen only to the rhythmic “tracatracatraca” of the train (292). Let it carry you away. To think in the era of Franco, Pedro concludes, is folly.

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This time of silence came to an official end for Spain when Franco died in November of 1975. With the dictator gone, the plans and pains of four decades could at last be spoken. Political parties could be legalized, the marginalized and regionalized could be given voice, and truth could be restored. In the late 1970s and 1980s, destapes, movidas, and democracies followed, private memories becoming public histories, and dangerous ideologies transforming into absolute political majorities. Spaniards devoured home-grown novels, satisfying the cravings of a long-starved intellectual body. These stories, “Made in Spain,” surprised the pundits, crawling their way up best-seller lists during the 1980s. Spaniards read themselves, dressed themselves, and with the cinema of Pedro Almodóvar in particular, watched the world watch them do so.

As Spain sped toward 1992, the magical year when Olympics, World Expos, museum openings, and the like would ceremonially confirm the state’s arrival in the community of the West—that world of open, transparent, and boisterous democracy—it appeared that Spain’s time of silence had finally ended. As novelist Rosa Montero confidently declared at the time, “Spain has successfully extricated itself from centuries of isolation and boarded the train of history” (315). It appeared that the locomotives of Spain’s contemporary Pedros would be heading to noisier climes—and at a faster pace.

Literature, what Montero knew best, certainly appeared to support her claim. Hinted at earlier with the critical and popular successes of Luis Landero’s Juegos de la edad tardía (1989) and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Beatus Ille (1985) and El jinete polaco (1991), Spanish novels in the 1990s began rummaging about in the disremembered spaces and times of things past—specifically, its civil war and the decades of authoritarian rule that followed. As the decade progressed, Félix Azúa (Cambio de bandera), Rafael Chirbes (La larga marcha), Rosa Montero (La hija del Caníbal), Isaac Montero (Ladrón de lunas), and Antonio Soler (El nombre que ahora digo) joined a conversation that would finally explode into popular consciousness with the surprise mass-market triumph in 2001 of Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina. The next years saw more reflections on war, dictatorship, and transition from Manuel Longanares (Romanticismo), Belén Gopeguí (Lo real), Isaac Rosa (El vano ayer), Suso de Toro (Hombre sin nombre), Manuel Rivas (Los libros arden mal), Ignacio Martínez de Pisón (El tiempo de las mujeres, Dientes de leche, Enterrar a los muertos, El día de mañana), Bernardo Atxaga (El hijo del acordeonista), Dulce Chacón (La voz dormida), Carme Riera (La mitad del alma) Almudena Grandes (El corazón helado and her nearly half-dozen novels of historical memory that have followed), and the aforementioned Azúa (Momentos decisivos), Muñoz Molina (La noche de los tiempos), and Chirbes (La caída de Madrid, Los viejos amigos, Crematorio, En la orilla). The sense of market saturation was marked in 2007 with the publication of Isaac Rosa’s ¡Otra maldita novela sobre la guerra civil! In the first decade of the new millenium remembering became not simply a trend but the trend; Jo Labanyi wrote at the time: “Memory has become an industry generating public interest for economic ends” (119). One writes a novel of the Spanish civil war, therefore one is a Spanish novelist—or at least a remunerated one.

And yet for all this industry of memory, what in fact was being remembered? Soldados de Salamina the most visible and arguably most representative of these novels, would seem an appropriate place to begin answering this question. With its metafictional play and historiographical reflections Cercas’s novel was hardly penned with the masses in mind and yet eventually attracted a wide and diverse readership. The single-minded goal of protagonist, narrator, and author—all wrapped into a single persona named Javier Cercas—was to uncover the truth about an episode in Spain’s civil war and, in turn, to understand a series of greater truths about the Spanish nation, if not human nature in general. Hence the surprising success of the novel would suggest that Spanish readers were curious about their past and prepared to confront it. That the popular success of the novel coincided chronologically with the first exhumation of civil war graves in Spain (2001)—an event that served as catalyst for the 2007 “Law of Historical Memory”—gives the novel greater weight as a register of, if not an active agent in, a decade that by appearance would seem the very opposite of Franco’s time of silence.

To be sure, Cercas’s novel digs into Spain’s civil war past as few earlier novels had dared. It takes seriously the motivation of soldiers and intellectuals on both sides of the conflict. It gives balanced accounts of their overlapping experiences and offers these accounts both from a variety of perspectives and with unusual transparency, the narrator taking care, for example, to signal when he quotes, when he summarizes, and when he speculates. Most importantly, Soldados withholds judgment. While acknowledging injustice and atrocity, neither its Republican nor Nationalist characters read as overly heroic nor demonic. Perhaps what all have in common is a quiet sense of disillusionment, a sense of the futility of their respective enterprises, and a kind of childlike wonder at the post-conflict peace they share. In sum, Soldados deserves credit for providing the Spanish reading public with a fresh take on a war that, in so many previous novels, seemed to be yet ongoing.

This original content is shaped, in turn, by a narrative form that “wants to know.” That is, Cercas’s self-named protagonist-narrator is himself the very model of civil-war curiosity. Unlike Pedro at the end of Tiempo de silencio, Javier Cercas (protagonist, narrator, and finally author) appears to want to know so badly that he cannot keep quiet about it. The first-person narrator is so thrilled by his search (working with “un empuje y una constancia que ignoraba que poseía” [with a drive and a tenacity I didn’t know I possessed] [143]) that he narrates not only what he finds but recounts with similar detail the often belabored process of finding it. Cercas shares with his readers the experience of knowledge discovery, from the earliest seeds stimulating first questions to the final process of connecting dots. It is as if Soldados were not only offering, but promoting, a model for the search of the past—that which would transform itself over the next few years into Labanyi’s “industry.”

To be sure, the enterprise clearly bore specific “noise-making” fruit. In addition to the atypical representation of a common shared humanity during Spain’s great twentieth-century conflict, the success of the novel resurrected the literary legacy of Falangist intellectual Rafael Sánchez Mazas, who, as Cercas’s narrator notes in the early pages of the novel, at the time of writing, had nearly disappeared from cultural memory. The renewed interest in Sánchez Mazas paved the way, in turn, for a more widespread rediscovery of many forgotten (because previously politically incorrect) falangist authors, thereby giving balance to the available civil-war legacy on contemporary Spanish bookshelves. These rediscoveries coincided chronologically with the premier of the popular Spanish television drama, Cuéntame como pasó [Tell Me How It Happened] and the widely discussed political intrigues surrounding passage of the aforementioned Law of Historical Memory. In sum, at first glance, evidence suggests that Soldados de Salamina not only registers, but simultaneously records, encourages, and even facilitates a widespread desire to know and bring a final end to the time of silence.

Critical reception, however, has been more mixed. Some, like Ana Luengo, find the work, for all its intellectual trappings, lacking in real political teeth: Soldados, she argues, is a novel meant only to be “a pleasant story… about some pure-hearted heroes who might serve as a memorial, so as to extol certain combatants while avoiding any politically critical rereading” (270). But others have come to Cercas’s defense. Robert Spires grants him a privileged place among an ethical contingent of Spanish authors who, Spires argues, counterbalance the nihilism of Generación X writers popular at the time. For Spires, the power of Cercas’s novel comes in its mixture of historical detail with historiographic thinking, a combination that challenges readers to accompany the author-narrator-protagonist on his exploration of a shared past. Samuel Amago concurs, describing Soldados as an exercise whereby the narrator works “to come to terms with the complexities of historiography and approach a new understanding of the larger importance of narrative to the human experience” (144). Jorge Saval praises Cercas for “lying about the story, in terms of its particularities, in order to tell the truth in terms of its essence” (70). David Richter explains the ethical relationship between author, novel, and reader, arguing that in blurring the traditional boundaries between fiction and history, the novel encourages its readers to reflect on the processes by which they themselves supposedly recover memory (285).

But what really are the effects of Cercas’s play with fiction and history? Alexis Grohmann, while acknowledging the blurring that Cercas’s defenders have signaled, compares it to those of similar narrative projects, specifically to Javier Marias’s 1998 novel, Negra espalda del tiempo. Both Negra espalda and Soldados de Salamina, she points out, purport to be honest explorations of reality: they both draw explicit attention to the process of their writing, to the intellectual and physical wanderings of their author-narrator-protagonists in piecing together the information that takes form before readers’ eyes as the novel in hand; they both provide details that challenge readers’ ability to distinguish between the fictional and factual aspects of their accounts. Grohman argues, however, that Marías’s wrestle with reality is much more honest. For Grohman, the truly rambling form of Negra espalda, when compared to the carefully planned structure of Soldados, belies in the latter an a priori plan. Cercas’s novel knows what it wants to know, whereas Negra espalda truly explores. Grohman is forced to conclude that Soldados in the end remains “a more or less traditional novel” (318). The appearance of historiographic exploration is ultimately just that—an appearance, a veneer borrowed from more intellectually and artistically courageous novels. Cercas copies their form to give his work a bit more of a political sheen (318). And therein lies the danger.

Which returns us to the question of knowing. Does Soldados de Salamina really want to know? Depending on the answer to this first question, we will then need to ask what the novel’s success tells us about the supposed time of knowledge, information, or noise that twenty-first-century Spanish readers and citizens inhabit.

To get straight to the point, a careful reading of Cercas’s novel indicates that the answer to the first question—does Soldados really want to know?—is quite possibly, no. As we have seen, Soldados purports to be about the discovery of knowledge. The protagonist’s obsession leads him to the heart of the very why and how of Spain’s civil war. The object of Cercas’s inquiry, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, was the man who caused the war, as the novel repeatedly informs us: (“y en los años treinta poca gente empeñó tanta inteligencia, tanto esfuerzo y tanto talento como él en conseguir que en España estallara una guerra” [and in the thirties few people pleged as much intellgience, as much effort and as much talent as he did to making war break out in Spain] [83; see also 107, 143, 192]). Sánchez Mazas was the ideological dreamer who brought fascism to Spain and then most eloquently promoted it. He was at the heart of that “pelotón de soldados” [squad of soldiers], who, falangists often prophesied, would one day save civilization (86, 136, 143).

Pere Figueras, Sánchez Mazas’s principal ideological opposition during that handful of days in the forest, neatly embodies the contrasting ideals of Republican thought. A humble autodidact, Figueras spends the few days he shares with Sánchez Mazas engaged in deep conversation that, if not intellectual—considering the different backgrounds of the two men—must at least turn on the ideas that until this point had so motivated them.

It “must” turn on such ideas, because readers are never actually provided the content of their conversation. While the novel tells us plenty of Sánchez Mazas’s official ideas, once the conflagration that he purportedly begins gets underway, his thoughts remain hidden; Cercas can only speculate (“Es probable que para entonces ya no creyera nada” [Probably by then he no longer believed in anything] [138]; “Quizá no era otra cosa que un superviviente” [Perhaps he was no more than a survivor] [139]). So when he and Pere talk, we imagine something important is being said. But what they actually say remains a mystery (“Nunca supo de qué hablaban” [He never knew what they were talking about] [118]). Other than one occasion in which Sánchez Mazas recounts the story of his escape—a story already told several times in the novel—readers have only silence.

What we do know, however, is that following these few shared days in the forest, neither the previously ideological Figueras nor the great intellectual mastermind of Falangist doctrine, Sánchez Mazas, ever again engages in serious political activity. Figueras returns to his rural village to farm the land. Sánchez Mazas, the great intellectual engine of the Falange, in even greater contrast, dies in near oblivion, writing decidedly apolitical fiction (132–40). A street, Cercas dryly remarks, is named after him.

And so it is that by the end of the novel’s second section, the eponymous “Soldados de Salamina,” we’ve actually learned nothing of what the novel purportedly sets out to discover. This second section, written in a style that approximates historical writing—the most widely accepted vehicle in the present era for laying bare the hidden truths of times past—finally reveals nothing. Pere Figueras moves on. Sánchez Mazas is a street name. Nothing more.

But the novel is not yet over, and its third and final section appears at last to provide some answers. If we can’t know what motivated the various bands of heroes to kill and be killed, perhaps we can know what motivated another hero to refrain from such barbarism. As part of an assignment for his local newspaper to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the end of civil war conflict, the narrator-protagonist begins the novel seeking a literary/historical equivalent to Antonio Machado. But as Conchi, his girlfriend of more plebian tastes, likes to remind him, what he really needs is a García Lorca; in other words, a hero.

Long after writing that original article, he at last finds his fantasmal hero, in an aging invalid named Antoni Miralles. Miralles, now confined to a French elderly-care facility, spent the prime of his youth as a soldier of the Spanish Republic. Continuing to survive while each one of his childhood friends and then army buddies were picked off one by one, Miralles ends up fighting in nearly every major battle of the Spanish civil war. When that war ends, he flees to France where, as a soldier of the foreign legion, he spends another five years fighting for the broader cause of democracy, freedom, and ultimately—with the revelation of the Nazi Holocaust—moral good, traversing Africa and Europe in some of the most extraordinary campaigns of WWII. Somehow he survives.

On top of it all, our protagonist happily discovers that Miralles proves the missing link to his own story—the one where he makes sense of Sánchez Mazas, Figueras, and the Spanish civil war. Miralles was there on the day Sánchez Mazas survived an execution. Miralles, a hardened veteran of the Republican cause, appears to have none other than the soldier who pardoned the life of the great intellectual force behind the very conflict in which he had so long been engaged. Miralles alone can explain this moment of reconciliation, of unexpected and inexplicable forgiveness between a hardened soldier and the man he knows to be the intellectual force behind the last three years of carnage. This is the episode that might allow us readers to understand, reconcile, and move on ourselves. If we cannot know what the soldiers in the forest thought in their moment of spoken reconciliation, at least we can know what the soldier of the prison thought in his moment of silent pardon. And if we can know this, perhaps we can understand the civil war and draw from it after all these years some deeper, redemptive meaning. It’s all so perfect.

Which is, indeed, the problem. A badly scarred dead man walking, Miralles makes a perfect contemporary hero—the Lorca that the protagonist’s intellectually shallow girlfriend insists his story needs in order to be, what she would consider, successful. Miralles is both Spanish and international—even Catalan without being offensively so. He is ideologically astute and yet humanistic, highly principled and yet decidedly down to earth. Though he holds the key to understanding, he is humble about his secret, reluctant to share.

Moreover, Miralles’s answer to the question of what he was thinking with his escaped prisoner caught helpless in his crosshairs is both perfect and perfectly telling. “Nada” [Nothing], he responds when Cercas’s narrator-protagonist insists on an answer. What passed through that soldier’s mind as he stood there, gun drawn on his prey, pressed by his military superior to reveal his discovery? “Nada,” insists Miralles.

The great hero, the one who solves the problem of Cercas’s so far heroless story, offers nothing. One would think that such an answer would not prove any kind of solution at all. And yet, the protagonist, the narrator, and the author intuit that such is enough.

Readers—specifically the popular reader that made Cercas’s novel into a surprise best seller—apparently, decided that such an answer was not only enough but precisely the answer they wanted. Perhaps it was the only answer they could accept.

The hero, Miralles, who fought for everything while thinking nothing, is the perfect twenty-first-century would-be romantic, global cypher: he appears to embody past beauty, but confesses to actually revel in a present state of mindless excess. Slowly wasting away in his rest home, he celebrates cheap television and imaginary sexual exploits (184). Carnal comfort now is his only concern, though such opinions can be forgiven since his past is, of course, exemplary (184). And though the scope of his activities was extraordinary, saving among other things civilization itself, he takes credit for none of it, instead distributing honor freely among a handful of forgotten childhood companions, who, in their anonymity, function as perfect surrogates for any potential ideological or biological progenitor readers might like to imagine as their own. Miralles is easy, convenient, heroic, and, perhaps most importantly, demands nothing of us.

This last point is truer than we originally think if we briefly step back from the text to consider that this man who thought nothing is himself very likely nothing. In other words, it is quite possible that Miralles does not actually exist. Miralles, we recall, appears only after a conversation wherein fellow writer Roberto Bolaño advises a frustrated Cercas to invent what he can’t find. Within a matter of a few lines, the name “Miralles” is suddenly uttered by none other than Bolaño. If we readers would be suspicious, we are quickly assuaged by Bolaño’s recollection of seeing Miralles dance to an old pasodoble one night outside his camper. The anecdote encourages the protagonist and his readers to connect Miralles with the soldier who forgave and who had earlier been described as dancing in the rain to the pasodoble, “Suspiros de España,” only hours before he was to think “nothing” as he lowered his gun from his Falangist target.

The connection, however, is all smoke and mirrors. If it is not enough that the song to which he dances, “Suspiros de España” [Sighing for Spain], is the most evident cultural leitmotif of the novel—yet another iteration of a soundtrack that runs through readers’ heads from the novel’s first pages—the link the protagonist establishes between the soldier and Miralles through the song is completely imagined: Bolaño never actually says that Miralles danced to “Suspiros.” Bolaño recalls only “en la música, un pasodoble muy triste y muy antiguo. . . que muchas veces le había oído tararear entre dientes a Miralles” [the music, as a very sad and very old paso doble… that he’d often herad Miralles hum under his breath] (162). Cercas adds in fact a disclaimer: “O eso es lo que entonces le pareció a Bolaño” [or that’s what it seemed to Bolaño] (162). Nowhere does Bolaño identify the song as the otherwise ubiquitous “Suspiros.” But it is a connection too perfect to resist, infused with the romanticism and informed by our hope to uncover past secrets.

Ironically, on the novel’s final page, as the story becomes its own novel in process, all this nothingness (nothing in the conversation between the two forest thinkers, nothing in the mind of the pardoning executioner, nothing to the supposed reality of the latter) starts to feel not only like something, but indeed like the perfect answer to all those questions about who and how and why regarding the civil war and Franco and the rest:

Allí vi de golpe mi libro, el libro que desde hacía años venía persiguiendo, lo vi entero, acabado, desde el principio hasta el final, desde la primera hasta la última línea, allí supe que, aunque en ningún lugar de ninguna ciudad de ninguna mierda de país fuera a haber nunca una calle que llevara el nombre de Miralles, mientras yo contase su historia Miralles seguía de algún modo viviendo y seguirían viviendo también, siempre que yo hablase de ellos, los hermanos García Segués–Joan y Lela–y Miquel Cardos y Gabi Baldrich y Pipo Canal y el Gordo Odena y Santi Brugada y Jordi Gudayol, seguirán viviendo aunque llevaran muchos años muertos . . . Vi mi libro entero y verdadero, mi relato real completo, y supe que ya sólo tenía que escribirlo, pasarlo a limpio, porque estaba en mi cabez desde el principio (<<Fue en el verano de 1994, hace ahora más de seis años, cuando oí hablar por primera vez del fusilamiento de Rafael Sánchez Mazas>>) hasta el final, un final en el que un viejo periodista fracasado y feliz fuma y bebe whisky en un vagón restaurante de un tren nocturno que viaja por la campiña francesa entre gente que cena y es feliz y camareros con pajarita negra, mientras piensa en un hombre acabado que tuvo el coraje y el instinto de la virtud y por eso no se equivocó nunca o no se equivocó en el único momento en que de veras importaba no equivocarse, piensa en un hombre que fue limpio y valiente y puro en lo puro y en el libro hipotético que lo resucitará cuando esté muerto. (208–09)

[There I suddenly saw my book, the book I’d been after for years, I saw it there in its entirety, finished, from the first line to the last, there I knew that, although nowhere in any city of any fucking country would there ever be a street named after Miralles, if I told his story, Miralles would still be alive in some way and if I talked about them, his friends would still be alive too, the García Segues brothers—Joan and Lela—and Miquel Cardos and Gabi Baldrich and Pipo Canal and el Gordo Odena and Santi Brugada and Jordi Gudayol would still be alive even though for many years they’d been dead… I saw my book, whole and real, my completed true tale, and knew that now I only had to write it, put it down on paper because it was in my head from start (“It was the summer of 1994, more than six years ago now, when I first heard about Rafael Sánchez Mazas facing the firing squad”) to finish, an ending where an old journalist, unsuccessful and happy, smokes and drinks whisky in the restaurant car of a night train that travels across the French countryside among people who are having dinner and are happy and waiters in black bow-ties, while he thinks of a washed-up man who had courage and instinctive virtue and so never erred or didn´t err in the one moment when it really mattered, he thinks of a man who was honest and brave and pure as pure and of the hypothetical book which will revive him when he’s dead.]

Cercas achieves the perfect ending even as he exposes its artifice. By acknowledging the role he plays in the story of this handful of unlikely heroes, he turns himself into the final and most significant member of the bunch. His honesty, wrapped up in the poetry of the moment, is disarming. We are almost forced to agree with him that he has indeed written into being the perfect hero. The writing-in-process technique Cercas employs here doubles the impact; we readers become fellow travelers in this hero-making journey. We hold our breath—and suspend our collective sense of disbelief—for a few final moments as Cercas finishes off what has suddenly become the perfect narrative. In suspending disbelief, are we not coauthors of this significant moment of overcoming? After all, it requires little fact checking to bring down Cercas’s house of cards. But we would rather enjoy the truth of beauty than of fact.

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In the end, what the mass reading public consumed when they read and praised Soldados de Salamina was no deep exploration of Spanish history or of the historiographic issues that would surround a legitimate enterprise of memory recuperation. Rather, they consumed a fiction about fiction, about heroes who thought nothing and who recognized in each other an ultimate nothingness and so who spent sleepless nights saying nothing. Civilization is not finally saved by a falangist slogan, a socialist ideal, or a “pelotón de hombres valientes.” What saved it then–for Sánchez Mazas, for Pere Figueras, and for Miralles—and what saves it now for the readers is the intuition that here there is nothing, even nobody: “Aquí no hay nadie.” And hence there is everyone and anyone who we can imagine fitting into what is at long last a palatable civil-war narrative.

Can there be a better hero today as we dig up graves while televising a fake past than the hero that is no one and, thus, is whomever we wish to imagine, with whatever thoughts we care to project upon him or, better yet, who never requires any thought because he offers nothing but the semblance of thought? The message of Soldados may in the end echo ironically that of Tiempo de silencio, another novel that ends with a protagonist lost in thought as he rides a train toward a new life. “No pensar”—don’t think. At least not about those years, that time of silence which remains with us. Roberto Bolaño’s message to his friend, while feigning historical excavation and its consequences, is ultimately about leaving the physical and mental graves untouched. Like Tiempo de silencio’s Pedro on the train to the Castilian village, eager to play chess and marry the local girl, Cercas’s protagonist heads into the darkness dreaming of movement without knowledge, “sin saber muy bien hacia dónde va ni con quién va ni por qué va” [not really knowing where he’s going or who he’s going with or why he’s going] (209). He is not bothered by ignorance and the silence of thought that necessarily follows, so long as he is able to move on: “siempre que sea hacia adelante, hacia delante, hacia delante, siempre hacia delante” [as long as it’s onwards, onwards, onwards, ever onwards] (209). Or as Martín Santos put it forty years earlier, “Tracatracatracatraca.”

Perhaps then, Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina was ironically not about historiographic dialogue but silence, not about the beginning of a period of memory recovery but about the end of the search. The only way beyond, in the end, was fictional. The truth was not out there. At least not factually. Cercas’s novel, then, is a cautionary tale for those who would mine literature for certainty. But it is a confirmation for those who would celebrate literature for its gifts of thought. Cercas’s protagonist wants answers—certainty that he would pull out of witnesses and locate in archives. That certainty would turn Soldados into the most Spanish of novels. But what Cercas’s protagonist finds instead is thought—questions and creativity issuing forth from his own literary mind and pen, as inspired by those of his fellow Spanish-language questioner and creator, Roberto Bolaño. In this light, Cercas’s very Spanish novel becomes Cercas’s Spanish-language novel, aligned on my mental bookshelf alongside the contemporary thought experiments, melding fiction and reality, of Bolaño, but also Marías, Pron, Zambra, and as we’ll see in the coming chapters, Eduardo Lalo, Wendy Guerra, and Xuan Bello. Soldados de Salamina, in its final chapter, buries a national past and pens a new language for a new way forward beyond imposible, because irresolvable, local conflicts.

To return to the question of knowing, if the question is about the Spanish Civil War, then Javier Cercas’s novel doesn’t want to know. It doesn’t want to because it can’t. However, if the question of knowing is about leaving behind a search for easy answers, then Javier Cercas’s novel joins with others of its ilk in embodying new ways of knowing. It is another sign for the end of a world.