There are many novels about the Spanish Civil War, but few -beyond the episodes of an endless war, of Almudena Grandes– Those that have portrayed the harsh and atrocious post-war years, those in which Francoism imposed peace on the victors by firing squads, purging and suffocating the defeated with hunger and misery.
Ignatius Martinez of Pisonwith a long and relevant career as a writer, now at the height of his creative maturity, finally offers us that novel that recounts the implacable and very hard first years of the postwar period in Madrid, desolate and turned into a battlefield of the survival for life.
‘castles of fire’not only because of its volume of nearly 700 pages, But because of his ambition, because of the breadth of his story that covers all the possible scenarios of those years of lead, it is that great novel of the Spanish postwar period that our literature needed.
‘Castles of Fire’ is a choral novel, with unforgettable characters, cruel and ruthless some, absolute losers others, and with a scenario of hopelessness for everyone, including the victors; a hopelessness that Martínez de Pisón is finally putting aside to open a window to the future.
Martínez de Pisón opens and closes ‘Castillos de fuego’ with a death and the announcement of a new life. Life and death, the two truths that govern the existence of people. It all begins with the burial of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of the Falange, and ends with the announcement of a new life in the pregnancy of Gloria, the daughter of Dionisio, the university professor purged by the Francoists.
In between, the hardest years, the most painful situations among the defeated; ignominy, the imposition of peace at all costs by the victors.
‘Castles of Fire’ is a total novel in which, with an admirable narrative maturity, Martínez de Pisón portrays all possible characters for us, all situations, all scenarios. All the misery and infamy of those years of Franco’s Madrid are in the pages of ‘Castillos de fuego’.
Characters that we find close like Cristina, with a brother killed in a bombing, another shot, and a third in the maquis, who laments at this scene of cruelty that prevents her from leading a normal life. “I just want to live. To be an ordinary person and lead an ordinary life. Is it too much to ask? I want to do the things normal people do“, she confesses desperately. Her friend Alicia, a movie ticket saleswoman, a dreamer of that world of movies, but who ends up in a brothel; Dionisio, the university professor who is purged and ends up taking refuge in religion and his daughter Gloria who stole all the weeks a few books from her father’s library to sell for a dozen eggs on the black market.
Or Valentín, who reminds us of the feared commissioner Conesa, a scoundrel who first made his way as an informer for his former communist comrades and thanks to that he became police commissioner; o Matías Revilla, a Falangist gyrfalcon who gets rich requisitioning valuables from the Reds with total impunity. Each protagonist has different traits that differentiate them and that together represent the society of the winners and losers.. All of them also without Manichaeism or ridicule, reflecting how many of them were not masters of their destinies, and could not do what they wanted but what was forced and try to resist and defend themselves. The circumstances themselves forced them to be vile and miserable in many cases. You had to defend yourself. Some were guided by the instinct of survival and adaptation, while others were guided by rancor, cruelty and revenge.
But Martinez de Pison also portrays all the picaresque or impunity of those years. The one with the black market narrating how the black marketeers took advantage of the fact that the Arganda train slowed down to throw bales of food out of the windows that rolled down the embankment and some children rushed to hide them among the cane fields. The firing squads at dawn and the coup de grace that allowed the residents to count how many had died each night.
The women of Social Aid who kept the children of the prisoners, changed their names and gave them to Francoist families.
Y the dangerous work of the communists to reorganize and destabilize the dictatorship. In those years they also fought with an internal enemy, the infiltrator who gave them away and ended up in custody.
Malnourished children and on the verge of rickets by a disease called famine.
The queues of relatives in the Porlier prison to visit the prisoners, while ‘the blondes’, the yellow-bodied vans brought new prisoners. They were young boys trapped by the war who now awaited the firing squad or, at best, a long sentence.
fire castles
- Ignatius Martinez of Pison
- Editorial: Six Barral
- Precio: 22,90 €
In the book is also all of Madrid at that time. Martínez de Pisón makes an absolutely masterful reconstruction. There is a meticulous and detailed documentation work that allows him to accurately recreate a Madrid of misery and fashion shops, informers and hunger, of its streets and squares from Ciudad Lineal, La Latina, La Elipa or Cuatro Caminos; its metro lines, its districts, the Retiro, the Casa de Campo.
‘Castles of Fire’ is not only the great unwritten post-war novel up to now, it is also the great novel by Martínez de Pisón who shows with it that he is in the prime of his long literary career. Superb and complete, ‘Castles of Fire’ is that great novel that every writer wishes to write one day.