Federico García Lorca, one of Spain’s great poets, was executed by Francisco Franco’s forces for his politics. The gifted poet Leopoldo Panero, hours away from the same fate, survived and became a somewhat reluctant literary functionary of the Franco regime. With The Age of Disenchantments, Aaron Shulman sets the stories of Panero, his wife Felicidad and their families in the context of the political chaos that erupted into the Spanish Civil War, the long aftermath of Franco’s dictatorship and beyond. Despite occasionally lazy writing (“the gong of good fortune finally rang”), Shulman paints a vivid panorama of lives changed by conflicts they couldn’t control. Many of their friends and family died, fighting on both sides or in the crossfire. Leopoldo and Felicidad survived through a combination of luck and a willingness to fly any flag of necessity. Unlike many mythmaking narratives of the Spanish Civil War, The Age of Disenchantments makes it clear that moral high ground was hard to find.
