Interview: Javier Cercas, author of the widely acclaimed novel of the Spanish Civil War, Soldiers of Salamis, tells Shane Hegarty that the success of the book may be 'the revenge of history'.
So, this is Javier Cercas. The real Javier Cercas. The face matches the author photograph on the dust jacket of Soldiers of Salamis, if not the Cercas who narrates this highly original and truly wonderful novel, which, since its publication there in 2001, has taken Spain by storm, is being published in 15 languages and has been made into a film by David Trueba, which premièred last month in Cannes
It is based on a true story, that of the Spanish fascist poet and founder of the Falangist movement, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, who escaped from a firing-squad in the final days of the Civil War when he was among 50 prominent Nationalist prisoners taken out to be shot. While hiding in the undergrowth, he was discovered, but spared, by a Republican soldier who looked him in the eye but turned and walked away. Mazas went on to find sanctuary with three deserting Republicans - his "forest friends" - and the four waited for the imminent arrival of Franco's troops.
In the novel, Cercas, obsessed with this story, sets out to find the unknown Republican soldier who let Mazas live, and determine what his thoughts were at that moment; why he spared a man who arguably, in the awful logic of that war, deserved to die. But the Cercas in the novel is only a character, a struggling journalist whose wife has left him and whose father has died. He is steeped in personal and professional crises, but finds redemption through this journey.
None of this corresponds with the actual Cercas, whose wife has not left him and who is not a journalist, but a lecturer since 1989 in Spanish Literature at the University of Gerona. When people meet his father, they are surprised to find that he is very much alive.
Born in 1962, Cercas is also a novelist, short story writer and essayist whose books include El móvil (The Motive, 1987), El inquilino (The Tenant, 1989), El vientre de la ballena (The Belly of the Whale, 1997) and Relatos reales (True Tales, 2000). He's a regular contributor to the Catalan edition of El Pais.
"It is a novel," confirms Cercas, who gave a public reading from Soldiers of Salamis in Dublin last week, albeit adding that it is a very particular type of novel. "That's because, in my opinion, the novel is a hybrid genre. It is everything. So, everything in this book is fact because the characters are real; the facts really happened , and so on. But everything is made up, because it is my view on that. I manipulate facts. I don't change facts, but look at them in a certain way so that they make sense."
Some of the book's detail mirrors his actual investigation into the story. Soldiers of Salamis is a novel that reads as reportage, only it takes a story with all its loose ends, and imagines how they might be tied up. "This novel doesn't only want to find historical truth but wants to go beyond that to find, say, a literary truth and a moral truth that is universal truth. History wants to find out raw facts, but literature wants to find universal truth."
Literature, he insists, needs a certain amount of deception. "History can go up to a point and after that literature wins, because after that it is intuition, it is imagination."
His publishers told him it was a great book but one that would be read only by old people and few others. Cercas, whose previous novel and short story collection had sold 3,000 copies each, agreed. But Soldiers Of Salamis has sold 500,000 in Spain and has been praised as the first great novel about a war that, for all its association with art and artists, has an uncertain literary tradition.
That it focuses on a fascist writer, even one described as a "good minor poet" is a novelty. There had been an attempt, about a decade ago, to reappraise fascist artists, although it was confined to literary circles. If there were great writers among the fascists, says Cercas, they have been buried by history. It's a point made in the novel, that the fascists won the war but lost the literature.
As a writer, Cercas is fascinated by Mazas. "Is it possible to be a son of a bitch but also to be a good writer? This is a big question," he muses.
Mazas incited young men to rebel, but did not engage in the fighting. Trapped in Republican territory, he rode out much of the war in the refuge of the Chilean embassy in Madrid. He was a minister without portfolio for a brief period in Franco's government before inheriting a fortune and settling into an early retirement of moneyed inertia. He did not have regrets at the horrors that followed.
"The responsibility of using words is one of the main issues," says Cercas. "I'm sure Sánchez Mazas didn't want a war, but he used some words that incited a war. So maybe he was horrified about doing that. But you must be responsible in using words, because they create reality. We have this very cultivated person who is guided by his intelligence. I don't think he was a bad guy, but he contributed to this war and he was on the bad side as well."
In the novel, Cercas contrasts him with a heroic Republican, Miralles, who may or may not have been the soldier who spared Mazas in the forest. "We have this other guy who is not a reader," Cercas says. "Not a real barbarian, but not a cultivated man. But he is on the good side, and this is a big, big question in my mind. Modernity is saying that, from the 18th century, if we read and are cultured, then culture is an instrument of liberation. If we try to learn we will be free and have a better society. But the reality has shown us that we are not like that."
He describes the book's success as the "revenge of history". The stories of the men who fought in the Civil War, previously dismissed by their sons, are now much sought after in Spain, the "forest friends" becoming an object of fascination for the Spanish press. A story they had been unable to interest even their own families in has become treasured.
Those on the Republican side were fighting for freedom, says Cercas, "for a legitimate democratic republic against an illegitimate rebellion. And, of course, that was right. But nobody said thank you". Some of those from the Republican side went on to take part in the liberation of France in the second World War and were seen as heroes in France but were killed when they returned to Franco's Spain.
"Nowadays they are unknown in Spain," says Cercas. "They have not been rehabilitated. They don't exist in Spain. Someone should say thank you."
Acknowledging their contribution, though, was not his primary purpose. Instead he wanted to turn the heads of countrymen who had, like Sánchez Mazas, refused to reconcile themselves with a bloody history. "When Franco died in 1975, they decided not to look back, because if you look back we're going to be at war again," he says. "But it was a mistake. Maybe it was necessary, but the price was really high, because there is this fog of misconception. It's not exactly oblivion, but while historians have done a job, young people don't know the real thing. The collective conscience is not aware of what really happened. I mean, we were a fascist country for 40 years. Come on! So, the point is that it's false, it's stupid to say, let's say, that all Republicans were great, that it was a romantic war. I mean, wars are awful. The real truth, the whole truth is what we need to look at."
The novel is surprisingly dispassionate towards Mazas. Cercas describes himself as "left of centre", but he does not demonise his subject.
"Maybe one of the secrets of the success of the book is that my interest is not to judge anybody," he says. "I am not interested in judging anybody. I don't want to judge this guy, this fascist guy. Because I don't think that is the job of a novelist. What we should do is try to understand."
In understanding Mazas, he is trying to understand his country, but also his own family, who, like somany in Spain, supported and fought with the fascists.
"There are some people who say this is dangerous, because now you are going to justify fascism, but my view is that that's the contrary," Cercas says. "You should understand because it's the only way it cannot happen again. And the question is why, why, why the whole country became fascist and did these terrible things."
Soldiers Of Salamis has not been read only by old men. Young Spaniards - teenagers, schoolchildren - have relished it. Cercas still appears in slight shock that he may have achieved his ultimate aim.
"For me, a book is like changing life," he says. "If a book doesn't change my life, it's not a good book. Of course, I want to be changed, but I also want to change the reader's view of life. I know that's crazy, but I think that's the only way of doing serious writing."
Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, translated by Anne McLean, is published by Bloomsbury, £14.99
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist