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Jorge Martínez Reverte, the writer who invented Gálvez and narrated the Civil War, dies

2021-03-24T18:01:22.110Z


The journalist and historian, who was 72 years old, reported in March in an article in EL PAÍS that he suffered from carcinoma


Journalist, novelist, historian, screenwriter, anti-Franco militant, Jorge Martínez Reverte, who died this Wednesday at the age of 72, was also a resistant: during the postwar period, during the dictatorship and later a stroke that left him immobilized since 2014, although he did not lose a single his lucidity, nor his sense of humor, much less the desire to write.

He published an impressive book about his illness,

Uselessly handsome.

My battle against stroke

and two weeks ago he wrote his penultimate column in this newspaper about his cancer, a bitter visit that has finally dragged him to the other side of the lagoon.

Martínez Reverte's work is as diverse as his personality and intellectual curiosity were: he was an important author of crime novels, creator of the journalist Julio Gálvez through whose cases he portrayed the Spain of his time, and a very relevant historian.

He applied the same method to the Civil War that Antony Beevor has recounted World War II: focusing on a precise moment in history to break it down.

His books

The Battle of Madrid, The Blue Division,

The Battle of the Ebro

or

The Art of Killing

, A Military History of the Conflict, have become fundamental works for understanding what happened in the Civil War and its consequences.

He also wrote novels, such as

Guerreros y Traidores

, and investigations, such as a reconstruction of the Madrid murder of labor lawyers in 1979,

La matanza de Atocha

, which he signed with his sister Isabel.

  • 'A dignified death'.

  • 'Cancer'.

    Article by Jorge Martínez Reverte about his illness

  • "Wars allow many to 'normalize' cruelty"

As a journalist, he collaborated with numerous newspapers and magazines, such as

Posible

,

Ciudadano

,

Triunfo

,

Cambio 16

or EL PAÍS, where he had a weekly column, and worked for the Pyresa agency.

He was general director of Radio Televisión de Madrid and director of non-daily news programs for TVE.

He was a brave professional committed to democratic values.

Not only because he had to testify before a military court in 1980 for his revelations about the ultra-right networks in the Transition, but especially because of an article he published in this newspaper in 2008, in which he confessed how he helped his mother die with dignity .

That text deserved the Ortega y Gasset Prize for journalism and is one of the most important texts that have been written on euthanasia in Spain.

"Josefina Reverte was a beautiful woman, a mother of six children, loving and right-wing, who was 75 years old when, at the Concepción clinic in Madrid, she was diagnosed with breast cancer so advanced that she no longer had a remedy."

Thus began that report, entitled 'A dignified death'.

In it he related that one day he gathered his children, wore a

gin and tonic

, "with the festive air and the obligatory ceremony that should accompany a good long drink", and then he asked one of them to help him finish his suffering when it became unbearable, which he did.

It is a text that is difficult to read now without feeling a mixture of emotion and gratitude, when the euthanasia law has just been approved in Spain.

Martínez Reverte, with his courage and sincerity, helped many other people have a dignified death.

It is difficult to find a common thread in such a diverse and extensive work: in addition to thousands of articles and reports, he has published almost 30 books since, in 1979, he published

Demasiado para Gálvez

, the novel with which he started a series morally related to that of Pepe Carvalho by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

But, if there is a line that can join so many different points to draw a picture of his indefatigable creative endeavor - which naturally a stroke could not stop - it would be the search for the truth.

Martínez Reverte always wanted to tell things as they were, not as he thought they were, but as they were after a long and meticulous investigation.

It does not matter if it was the death of his mother, the Atocha massacre, the Civil War or his own stroke.

Asked by EL PAÍS journalist Juan Cruz in an interview about the sincerity with which he had related his own illness, he replied: “I am a journalist!

Although it seems somewhat grandiose, it seems that I have investigated life.

But, although it seems more grandiloquent still: I have investigated the death ”.

That phrase can be applied to the whole of his work: he recounted life and recounted death, always through those who suffered or enjoyed it.

On the method he used to write his essays on the Civil War, a mixture of archival work with interviews and reports, he noted: “The story of the war cannot be told without including what people felt in the trenches.

I believe that you have to combine historical rigor to explain important political or military decisions, but at the same time you have to give a voice to the people, from the perspective of the combatants or civilians from the rear.

And the greatest difficulty, at the beginning, was to find either memoirs and autobiographies of the protagonists or oral testimonies ”.

His work was also criticized, paradoxically for being too sincere, for example because of the harshness with which he recounted the republican repression in the first months of the Civil War in Madrid.

A group of historians, among whom were Javier Moreno Luzón and

He was the brother of journalist and writer Javier Reverte, who died in October 2020, which led him to discover Africa more than once.

Javier was a great travel narrator and Jorge a great narrator of the long trip to Spain.

Between the two they broadened, geographically but also morally, the gaze of thousands of readers.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2021-03-24

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