Javier Cercas is one of contemporary Spain’s most cclaimed novelists with work that has been translated into many languages. With Lord of All the Dead (published in Spain in 2017 and out now in an English translation), he has written a “nonfiction novel” relating to his family’s—and his country’s—past. Cercas is on the Left but his family supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The Francoist hero of his family was his great-uncle Manuel Mena, deemed a martyr by the local Right for falling in battle during the war. Mena was an army lieutenant leading a contingent of North African troops. He was only 19 when he died.
According to Cercas, his mother, who adored Mena with an affection undiminished by time, pestered him to write Lord of All the Dead. Year after year he put off the task, annoyed but intrigued as he filed new insights and stray gossip into an increasingly bulging folder. When he began, the author knew nothing of his ancestor beyond a few oft-told stories and a single photo of the young man in full dress uniform. Lord of All the Dead (the title alludes to The Iliad) is a journey into the past, literally. Cercas interviewed elders from the small town where his family originated, correlating memories and reconstructing life in a place whose residents—some of them—changed political colors as easily as they changed clothes.
Cercas began Lord of All the Dead with hopes to cull history from legend but found that establishing history’s granular facts is no easy task. Documents can be wrong, memories distorted; “it was as difficult to trap the past as it was to trap water in your hands,” he writes. The novelist in him wanted to enter into Mena’s life, “to smell exactly what he’d smelled and feel exactly what he’d felt.”
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Mena’s motivations for dying on what is seen nowadays (and by many of his contemporaries) as the wrong side of history? Cercas finds evidence that he was lured not by militarist-conservatism of Franco but the idealism of the Falange, the party whose communitarianism and calls to sacrifice were coopted by Franco. He finds evidence for the “Mena of his last days,” a young man turned “taciturn, absorbed, disenchanted, humble, lucid, aged and fed-up-with-war.” Cercas eventually loses his feeling of moral superiority as he draws a detailed panorama of lives defined by the limited perceptions and ideas of a particular time and place.
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