Max Aub, translated by Gerald Martin
Verso
Originally published in Mexico in 1943, Aub wrote Field of Honour in 1939, only a few years after the events depicted in the book. It is the first installment of a six-novel epic about the Spanish Civil War that Aub called The Magic Labyrinth. Between the writing and the publication, Aub had been imprisoned by the French, deported to a concentration camp in the Algerian Atlas Mountains to work on a railroad the French were building, and eventually escaped to Mexico where he fraternised with many Spanish intellectuals who also had fled into exile. He obtained Mexican citizenship but, as the Introduction by Ronald Fraser notes, he never felt "totally at home there." Aub was of the generation that came of age in 1927, which included Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí and several other artists and writers, all of whose works celebrated the brief Second Republic before the military coup and the ensuing civil war.
Aub wrote about "reality's impact on me and mine on reality." He considered Spain the "labyrinth" at the core of his books, and the stories represented "real" rather than imagined events. Fraser writes that "whatever he had experienced he used 'to write what I imagine.'"
Field of Honour follows Rafael López Serrador from his rural village to the provincial capital Castellon, and then to Barcelona in the years leading up to the start of the Civil War in July 1936. Along the way, the naive, ill-prepared youth immerses himself in the seething politics of the day. Serrador learns from everyone: idealist, individualist, revolutionary, reactionary. He associates with anarchists, falangists, communists, pimps, whores, Carlists -- in short, the men and women who represented all the competing forces in Spain that eventually tore the country apart and set the stage for Franco's dictatorship.
Fraser also points out that "by literary inclination, Aub was a dramatist -- in which individuals' hopes, doubts, determinations, and despair are expressed, often with a bitter, ironic thrust." The playwright's touch is obvious. Much of the action of the novel is presented in dialog between the various characters. These long but vivid scenes reminded me of the heady days of my youth when we gathered for hours of political argument, cultural awareness, debate and polemics. Similarly, Aub's characters play word games with one another. They use puns, puzzles, poetry, and dogma in their matches of wit and ideology. They argue in the smoky bars and dimly lit streets about the class struggle, nationalism and internationalism, the Russian Revolution and the Spanish monarchy. Aub skillfully sets the scene (there also are paragraphs and paragraphs of description) -- he wants us to see, smell and feel the Barcelona he knew and obviously loved, the Barcelona on the verge of exploding, a cauldron of boiling humanity yearning to create a destiny and a future. When the explosion finally occurs, it is more shocking and abrupt than any of them anticipated, and much more definite.
I quote at length from a passage near the end of the book to provide a glimpse into t
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Great post. My TBR stack just got taller. With so much reading, when do you make time to write?
Ditto. I just added two of the titles to my list of books in Spanish to read. And two to the books in translation list. Keep them coming, Manuel. Congrats to Edgar winners. LCCC
same as the last two, my pile keeps getting taller and taller...now to find the time. Great post!
So many books, so little time. I believe in the old saying, to be a good writer, be a good reader first. I may not be all that good of a writer, but I do read all right, even though it seems that it takes me much longer to get through a book these days. The books on this list do sound intriguing. I hope to soon have a review of Max Aub's classic ready for La Bloga. Maybe those of you picking up a few of these books will also review them for La Bloga? But wait, there's more next week.