Volume 24, Number 19 · November 24, 1977
The Lorca Murder Case
By Michael Wood
García Lorca: Playwright and Poet
by Mildred Adams
Braziller, 204 pp., $8.95
García Lorca, Asesinado: Toda la verdad
by José Luis Vila-San-Juan
Editorial Planeta, 299 pp., 500 ptas
Federico García Lorca: Murder in Granada
directed by Humberto Lopez y Guerra
Swedish Radio TV/Channel 13
The death of a writer changes his writings, fills them with apparent hints and prophecies. If the writer is Spanish, the hints of death itself are overwhelming, and the prophecies often seem uncanny. Assassination is mentioned nine times in Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York, for example—once actually in the eerie phrase Comprendí que me habían asesinado, 'I realized I had been assassinated.' The effect of this, of course, is to lend a weird pathos to the squalid occasion in 1936 when Lorca was taken out to a road near his native Granada, and literally assassinated. But another effect is to make the poems themselves seem curiously shallow, metaphorical in the thinnest, most literary sense, only metaphorical, the work of a man who doesn't know (or care) what assassination really means.
Review, 4058 words
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