Volume 51, Number 15 · October 7, 2004
Return to Catalonia
By Colm Tóibín
Soldiers of Salamis
by Javier Cercas, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Bloomsbury, 210 pp., $23.95
The transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain after the death of Franco in 1975 was a model of decorum, choreographed with skill. There were to be no recriminations against the old regime, which was to be consigned to the dustbin of history through silence rather than show trials. Neither the life and death of the old dictator himself nor the events of the civil war were commemorated or much mentioned after 1975. The street names, which had paid homage to the fascist and Falangist leaders, were taken down and changed in the night while we slept. The silence worked wonders; it allowed for a new constitution, great autonomy for the regions (or nations as some of them would have it), and a strong sense of democracy everywhere outside the Basque country. But strangely, in those years of easy and friendly freedoms, the silence exerted its sinister power and influence in the private realm more than in the public, and there, in families and in villages, it did a great deal of harm.
Review, 4501 words
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