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April 2008

publication date: Apr 1, 2008
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author/source: Polly Evans
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A few weeks ago I went to the Royal Geographical Society to hear Giles Tremlett talking about his book Ghosts of Spain. Spain’s a country that I’ve always loved – I studied Spanish at university and spent a year living in a town called Plasencia, in the west of the country – and Tremlett was engaging and interesting, so at the end of the lecture I bought a copy. Because that’s been my reading for the past week or two, I’m focussing this month’s book reviews on books about Spain. Ghosts of Spain is first up, and that’s followed by a couple of books that I have greatly enjoyed, A L Kennedy’s On Bullfighting and Gerald Brenan’s South from Granada.
 
 
 
This book starts off with an intriguing development in Spain’s recent history: the digging up of civil war graves. Spain’s civil war lasted from 1936 to 1939. It pitted neighbour against neighbour and father against son. The victorious Franco ruled until 1975; when he died Spain’s transition to democracy was for the most part peaceful thanks, prinicipally, to the pacto del olvido – the pact of forgetting. The agonies of the civil war and subsequent dictatorship were swept under the carpet, never to be mentioned except in whispers behind closed doors. Then in 2002, villagers from the tiny pueblo of Poyales del Hoyo dug up three women, brutally murdered by Falangists during the civil war, from their shallow roadside grave and reburied them in the village cemetery. Everyone had always known they were there; the women’s children and other family members still lived in the village. But the pact of forgetting had dictated that they let the dead lie. With this reburial, the old scars were reopened.
 
This book is not just about the ongoing effects of Spain’s civil war, however. It takes Tremlett around the country – where he has lived for 20 years and works as the Guardian correspondent – and draws an engaging portrait of his adopted homeland and its people. He considers the issues of Basque and Catalan separatism; he travels to the most dangerous gypsy enclaves of Seville in search of flamenco; he joins modern-day Francoists at their extraordinary – and to most, probably, distasteful – gathering at the generalísimo’s tomb on the anniversary of his death. It’s a fascinating book that shows an impressive depth and variety in its coverage. Anyone who wants to understand Spain beyond the costas (though that’s here too) should definitely take a look.
 
 
 
A. L. Kennedy won the Costa Book of the Year a couple of months back for her novel Day. She has a reputation for reviewing her reviewers and ripping apart their pitiful prose, which makes writing anything about anything she writes a little daunting. See http://www.a-l-kennedy.co.uk/vital.htm for some examples. But the likelihood of her ever reading this is small, so I shall continue.
 
On Bullfighting is tiny and short, which has its benefits. It’s also intricately erudite and beautifully written. At the time of writing, A. L. Kennedy was suffering excruciating pain from her back – she later learned that she had a displaced disk in almost exactly the same place that the matador sinks his sword into the bull to kill it.
 
“As a credible coincidence in fiction, of course, this wouldn’t work. The idea of my leaving for Madrid and the Las Ventas plaza while inadvertently acting as a (barely) walking personification of the corrida’s first two acts would never see the light of day in any self-respecting novel. I’m recording my airport travails here because they were a fact – and intervention of chance in reality – and another proof that God, as an author, has absolutely no shame and an extremely sophisticated sense of humour.”
 
Kennedy is not Hemingway: macho bravado has no place here. Rather this is an elegant piece of writing which delves into the history, personality, and technicalities of bullfighting. She approaches the subject as a novice: her first corrida, appropriately enough, is the debut performance of novilleros. It’s a cruel, clumsy spectacle that results in one of the matadors being gored. The last bullfight of the book, however, showcases one of Spain’s best and, while never converted, Kennedy in the end appreciates, I think, the art and emotion of this strangely horrible, peculiarly enticing sport.
 
 
 
This is one of the classics among English-language writing about Spain. Brenan moved in 1919 to the village of Yegen in the Alpujarras – a jumble of valleys south of the Sierra Nevada. This area is now much loved by tourists but back then, just after the First World War, it hadn’t seen many outsiders. When Brenan told the local priest that he was a Protestant, the priest “brushed this aside as a matter of small importance and, patting me on the back, said, ‘Never mind that, man. You come to mass and you’ll find it will do you no harm. But a word in your ear. Don’t tell people that you are a Protestant. The country people are very ignorant and won’t understand.’” Brenan subsequently found out that some of the villagers thought that Protestants were people with tails.
 
Not all of Brenan’s London friends, who included Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the painter Carrington and her friends Ralph Partridge and Lytton Strachey liked the place when they came to visit. “When Leonnard and Virginia Woolf were preparing to come out and stay with me, [Strachey] advised them strongly against it, declaring in his high-pitched voice that it was ‘death’.”
 
Brenan, needless to say, was more sympathetic to his new home, and his book is a delightful portrait of rural Spain, with all its history, culture and colour, before the invasion of the postcard stands.