Lord of All the Dead

August 1, 2019

As with the Man Booker International Prize long-listed The Impostor, Cercas reconstructs a life with a novelist's finesse, raising the question whether this is fiction or nonfiction (see the subtitle). His subject is his great-uncle Manuel Mena, who died at 19 fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Was he a fascist or an idealist? Can a good man be aligned with a bad cause? Already winner of the inaugural André Malraux Prize.

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Starred review from November 18, 2019
In this cleverly crafted memoir, Cercas (The Imposter) investigates the life of his great-uncle Manuel Mena, a right-wing Falangist who died in the Spanish Civil War’s Battle of the Ebro in 1938. His mother compares Mena, her uncle, to the pure and noble Achilles, “lord of all the dead,” in The Iliad. The left-leaning Cercas, however, contemplates whether he should write about the “shameful story” of Mena’s political motivations as a supporter of Spanish dictator Franco. Cercas shares his dilemma with friend David Treuba, filmmaker and fellow Francoist descendant, who accompanies him to Ibahernando, Cercas’s ancestral village. There, the duo films conversations with the remaining elder relatives and family friends who knew Mena as they struggle to understand why this “industrious, reflective and responsible adolescent” died supporting ideologies that betrayed the Spanish people. “Can you be noble and pure and at the same time fight for a mistaken cause?” Cercas asks. He investigates how people living in tumultuous times develop unexpected political allegiances—and looks at the unintended consequences of those circumstances. Over time, he grows to appreciate the personal and philosophical conflicts Mena faced amid political upheaval, concluding, “I had no right whatsoever to consider myself morally superior to him.” While reflecting on his own life and family, Cercas vividly portrays a complex figure.

Starred review from November 1, 2019
A notable Spanish writer haunted by his family's allegiances during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) manages to achieve a magnificent reconciliation. Having addressed the war in previous works of both fiction and nonfiction, Cercas (The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, 2018, etc.) wrestles in this "nonfiction novel" with a persistent obsession: the short life and "glorious death" of a revered member of his family, his great-uncle Manuel Mena, who died at age 19 as an enthusiastic Falangist (the foe of the Republicans) in the Battle of the Ebro in 1938. Mena had been adored by the author's mother, who lived in the tiny village of Ibahernando in Extremadura. She had been relocated as a young bride to live in Catalonia, and the family had effectively buried Mena's name. Shame runs at the heart of this story, as the tragedy of the civil war created terrible fissures between Francisco Franco's loyalists and the Republicans in the tiniest towns of Spain, including the socially stratified village of Ibahernando. Indeed, Cercas had been haunted and obsessed by the shame of his family's Francoist loyalties his entire life, and he vowed never to write about Mena, although his mother--a kind of long-suffering Beckett-ian character waiting her whole life for a return to the lost glory of her family's past--hoped he would. Visiting the village and carefully enticing some of the skittish elders who had lived through the war to speak with him, the author clearly illustrates the deep divisions that plagued Spanish society during that tumultuous period. Cercas is a marvelous writer, and his character studies of the elusive Mena are masterly. Ultimately, grappling with the enormously nuanced, continuing story of sacrifice, passion, and dishonor allowed for significant forgiveness and release. A beautiful, moving story that must have been extremely difficult for the author to write. Thankfully for readers, he persisted.

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January 1, 2020
Internationally recognized for his newspaper editorials and novels, including The Imposter (2018), Cercas revisits the Spanish Civil War, a frequent focus of his writing, through a uniquely personal lens, the life of Manuel Mena, the author's great-uncle, who died fighting in support of the fascist Franco regime. In this self-described "nonfiction novel," Cercas employs the storytelling techniques of dramatic literature to confront this uncomfortable facet of his family's and his country's history. Instead of plodding chronologically through Mena's biography, Cercas pulls the reader into his investigative journey as he sorts through facsimiles of hospital records, scans of handwritten correspondence, and childhood photographs of his great-uncle's classmates from the remote village of Ibahernando. Though some readers may struggle to appreciate the minutiae of 1930s Spanish politics, Cercas forgoes an exhaustive dive into local party affiliations in favor of a humanizing view of his subject. The result is a fascinating, complicated portrait of a young soldier driven to action by the crises of his time and of the present-day relative who seeks to understand him.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)