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The Civil War of Pérez-Reverte, too much pedagogy

2020-10-10T14:24:45.015Z


The writer's approach to the contest in Line of Fire is weighed down by an excess of didacticism that takes away the credibility of the characters and turns them into stereotypes


The novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte deserve a spectacular promotion and that is why it is convenient to discard from the beginning two

claims

coined around the book: neither is it the great novel about the Spanish civil war that the author wanted to write nor is it a novel about the battle of the Ebro, but about a fictitious and deliberately irrelevant episode in that enormous drama of the summer of 1938. Ten days of blood and hundreds of deaths fill the almost 700 pages of a very long novel, not so much because there is a lot of death to narrate as for a reason technique which is in turn ideological.

Pérez-Reverte tells of the Republican conquest and the subsequent loss to rebel hands of a small town located between Mequinenza and Fayón, very close to the river.

There is no such town (Castellets del Segre), but it could exist: the story pivots on its control and loss to portray the plurality of factions that each side contributed to perfect the massacre.

The first Falange flag, for example, does not appear until page 358, in the same way that the journalists who cover the activities of the International Brigades are also well advanced in the novel: it is "horror faced with another horror", Republican captain Bascuñana says, and no longer, as he had believed at the beginning, the "fight of good against evil."

This very limited story allows the best virtues of the writer to shine, but illuminates with the same power his flagrant weaknesses.

The end of the book, the last 30 or 40 pages, are a good example of the narrative nerve and the addictive rhythm that drives the action to put the reader in the concrete and breathable intimacy of a fast-paced drama: there is no adiposity, there is energy and muscle, the sheer gymnastics of the action novel.

There he abandons the pedagogical overdose that has been disseminating throughout the book so that the reader would know the motivations, setbacks, confusion and vulgarities that have led some and others to kill themselves in a lost town in the Ebro.

And it is that technical decision that is ideological at the same time that flattens the novel, takes away its best virtues and turns the gymnastics of action into didactic magnesia that weighs down, sometimes even embarrassment, its credibility and that of many of its characters.

From the declarative feminism practiced by communist women (it is irrelevant that they could no longer fight in the first line of fire at that time) to the characterization of several of the protagonists, Pérez-Reverte has resorted to resources that are too crude for each one to respond the kind that its author needs.

Of course, the Russian political commissar is a ruthless being, but Captain Bascuñana will know how to resist his brutality.

It even seems to the communist Patricia that the captain's "dry, strong, masculine smell" is not "at all unpleasant", as she will repeat a hundred pages later just as convinced.

He likes it when she is silent and because he has already learned that "the borders between the evil and the righteous, between the bourgeois control of democracy and the dictatorship of the worker and peasant masses" are not "as perfectly clear" as she I had believed.

That is why she, in turn, is "touched by that resigned melancholy of a soldier without fortune" of the captain and a mustache that does not lose even when he is killed (despite the fact that the Republicans do not use it).

There are dozens of similarly stiff and false situations that range from the sweetest man in the world (who at the same time murders in cold blood those already surrendered at the Mountain barracks) to the diatribe of journalists against politicians who do not stain the hands: “irresponsible mob”.

Each subgroup of one side - the legionaries, the Falangists, the Requets, the deserters who do not know how to desert, the Moors like the wonderful Corporal Selimán - or the other - the fanatical and dynamite communists, the unreliable mix of anarchists, Trotskyists and others ralea of ​​the fourth battalion, the fifth of the bottle that falls without remedy— they must carry their informational and soul pill, as each protagonist also has his biographical file reserved so that we can make the composition of the place.

In so many of these episodes and dialogues, the novel falters, falters and loses steam, but perhaps the most serious problem lies in the implicit meaning behind the equalization of all in a "clash of goatherds", where both fight bravely and They repeat it over and over again, as an authentic populist refrain of the novel: those on the other side are "guys with hair on chest" and "for how lazy you are, you have fought well", as they say to each other later to be crushed.

What this procedure ends up achieving is

dephoning

the ideological and political reasons for the war.

The emphasis on the human dimension of the drama, that horror against horror that Bascuñana says, carries within it a toast to the sun of illusory brotherhood.

They were all human, of course they were, but this novel makes many of them mere human prototypes and reduces almost to nothing the legitimate reasons that justify that war.

Captain Bascuñana was right and war is a horror, but it is also "the fight of good against evil", at least from the moment Franco mounted a coup against the Republic.

FIRE LINE

Author:

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Publisher:

Alfaguara, 2020

Format:

Hardcover (688 pages) and Kindle version.

Find it in your bookstore

Buy from € 10.44 on Amazon

Source: elparis

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