Flawed heroes
Javier Cercas sprang to international attention with Soldiers of Salamis, a best-selling novel that puts historical characters in fictional circumstances, and suggests that true heroism sometimes demands the betrayal of conventional loyalties, whether republican or fascist.
His new book started as a novel about another iconic moment in Spanish history: the military coup against Spain’s young democracy on 23 February, 30 years ago last month. But he confesses at once to failure: “incapable of inventing what I know about 23 February, illuminating its reality with fiction, I have resigned myself to telling it.”
