Student Blogs

I see a steady decline in my enjoyment of these readings but it is much more blamed on final burnout rather than the quality of the books. I hope my blog posts continue to attempt to give them justice as we have discussed; the authors might not be bigger than us but their books are. […] read full post >>

I thought this novel, like all the other novels assigned for this course, to be interesting. Although this novel is supposed to be fiction, it can also be classified as an autobiographical work because it incorporates several autobiographical elements through the overlap of the life of the real writer and his fictional counterpart. Because it […] read full post >>

In Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis, Cercas takes us through the emotional and mental struggle of war, and in particular the Spanish Civil war. While the title of the book, and indeed the setting of the novel would suggest to us, the audience, that the war described in the book takes place vaguely in the […] read full post >>

Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas was a somewhat interesting novel, but I cannot say I particularly enjoyed the plot. I found the narration to have a very slow rhythm which didn’t keep me engaged and the many specific details … Continue reading → read full post >>

Hey Everyone,  Writing this week’s blog post has been the absolute worst for me. To start off, I read and completed my blog post for next week by accident. Then, WordPress stopped working. Anyways, I found this reading really interesting. I finished it in about 3 separate sittings (with some short breaks on my phone), […] read full post >>

Hi Everyone! In this week’s blog post I am going to be reflecting on Soldiers of Salamis, a novel written... read full post >>

Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis was really unique in how it seemed to blur lines between reality, history, and fiction and pose interesting questions about knowability in the process. Throughout the first part, I felt that the book was more “lifelike” than many of the others I’ve read, probably because it takes place more recently and […] read full post >>

This week’s book also continued with the theme of war that we have been exploring in other novels.  The recent... read full post >>

You all know that this was coming, but I was biased coming into the book because it was written in... read full post >>

This book was simply just ‘okay’ in my opinion. Not the best but also not the worst. I think that it was written well however I just think that I don’t particularly find much interest in the subject and themes surrounding war. I often find that war books are so depressing and sad which obviously […] read full post >>

Cercas’s novel was a very nice blend of truth and fantasy to it just like Bolanos Amulet. The main difference is the narrators and authors. Bolano felt like a big-league writer who was already very established. while Cercas is a person who is struggling to find his groove in the writing industry and has a […] read full post >>

A common theme I have come across in the books we have been reading recently is war. Last week having read Amulet, in which a woman hides from the army invasion in her university bathroom and the week before that with The Trenchcoat and its totalitarian control and paranoia. I think it is awfully relatable […] read full post >>

This week, the assigned book was Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas. To be completely honest, I started this book very confused. I wasn't quite sure whether or not this book was a work of fiction or a biographical re-telling of true events. After watching the lecture video and doing some googling, I finally understood that it was a sort of mix of both, a historical fiction about real people that existed and real events that happened. When I went into this book, I went in without much knowledge on the history of Spain and its civil war. This text kind of forced me to do some learning about Southern Europe in the 1900s to understand the context that lies behind this story. 

As we near the end of this semester, I can see how there are a few major literary themes that have been consistently present in the texts that we read in the beginning, all the way to now. One of these major themes is memory and its significance in storytelling. From Proust, Paris Peasant, The Shrouded Woman, W or the Memory of Childhood to Soldiers of Salamis, the importance of memory is a recurring topic. In the first part of Soldiers of Salamis, the narrator, who is a journalist, attempts to hunt down the details of the story behind the escape of Sanchez Mazas from a firing squad. Throughout this hunt, he ends up meeting various people who are distantly connected to Sanchez Mazas. The narrator is always questioning the truth and the reliability of the accounts that are told to him. There is also one moment where he wonders whether the tales that people remember are what actually happened, or simply the memorized script that has become reality just out of having been recited so many times. 

Here is a quote that I liked: "[...] I also decided that the book I'd write would not be a novel, but simply a true tale, a tale cut from the cloth of reality, concocted out of true events and characters, a tale centered on Sanchez Mazas and the firing squad and the circumstances leading up to and following it. This quote stood out because I think it represents a merge of the narrator's journalistic drive and desire to be a "real" writer. It summarizes his obsession with uncovering the true events and his desire to put it together into a written tale. 

Here is my question for this week: Why was the narrator so intent on finding out the exact truth of this story?

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This week, the assigned book was Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas. To be completely honest, I started this book very confused. I wasn't quite sure whether or not this book was a work of fiction or a biographical re-telling of true events. After watching the lecture video and doing some googling, I finally understood that it was a sort of mix of both, a historical fiction about real people that existed and real events that happened. When I went into this book, I went in without much knowledge on the history of Spain and its civil war. This text kind of forced me to do some learning about Southern Europe in the 1900s to understand the context that lies behind this story. 

As we near the end of this semester, I can see how there are a few major literary themes that have been consistently present in the texts that we read in the beginning, all the way to now. One of these major themes is memory and its significance in storytelling. From Proust, Paris Peasant, The Shrouded Woman, W or the Memory of Childhood to Soldiers of Salamis, the importance of memory is a recurring topic. In the first part of Soldiers of Salamis, the narrator, who is a journalist, attempts to hunt down the details of the story behind the escape of Sanchez Mazas from a firing squad. Throughout this hunt, he ends up meeting various people who are distantly connected to Sanchez Mazas. The narrator is always questioning the truth and the reliability of the accounts that are told to him. There is also one moment where he wonders whether the tales that people remember are what actually happened, or simply the memorized script that has become reality just out of having been recited so many times. 

Here is a quote that I liked: "[...] I also decided that the book I'd write would not be a novel, but simply a true tale, a tale cut from the cloth of reality, concocted out of true events and characters, a tale centered on Sanchez Mazas and the firing squad and the circumstances leading up to and following it. This quote stood out because I think it represents a merge of the narrator's journalistic drive and desire to be a "real" writer. It summarizes his obsession with uncovering the true events and his desire to put it together into a written tale. 

Here is my question for this week: Why was the narrator so intent on finding out the exact truth of this story?

read full post >>

This week I read Soldiers of Salamis, a novel in which the protagonist begins by expressing his unhappy life, with his father's death, the departure of his wife, and his having to give up his fiction career to become a journalist again. He later interviews Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, who is giving a lecture at the university and tells the story of his father's confrontation with a firing squad. His father was shot in the Collell Sanctuary, escaped, was arrested in Barcelona, but took advantage of the chaos to hide in the forest before the arrival of Franco's troops and was found by a soldier who let him go. The journalist of this story was interested in Rafael Sanchez Mazas, and he began to collect stories about him, intentionally or unintentionally and decided to be the narrator of this story. The author of the novel is a seeker, not only in search of the details of the story and the forgotten hero but also in pursuit of his dream of becoming an author, which failed in its first attempt. Through these many searches, the author eventually reconstructs himself and a history that gradually becomes clearer.

The novel is divided into three parts, but the last part is, in my opinion, the climax of the whole story. In this part, the protagonist learns Miralles' account through an interview with Roberto Bolaño, giving the whole story a soul. As a witness of the civil war, Miralles saw young men who were once as passionate as he died on the battlefield, forgotten by the people and abandoned by the world. So in this section, the protagonist and Bolaño explore the theme of "heroes.

"I think there's almost always something blind, irrational, instinctive in a hero's behaviour, something that's in their nature and inescapable. Also, you can be a decent person for a whole lifetime, but you can't be awe-inspiring without a break, and that's why a hero is only a hero exceptionally."

Who is the real hero in this civil war? Perhaps in the eyes of Cercas, the author of this book, the legendary Mazas is not his favourite object, and the soldier who turned away may be the hero he most wanted to find. But after searching in vain, Cercas had to invent an epilogue in order to give the story a perfect ending: Miralles crossed the West-France border, joined the French resistance and attacked Germany with the Allies. At the end of the war, he lives in anonymity in a French sanatorium. Eventually, Cercas used the novel to do justice to the soldiers who died without a name.

 Soldiers of Salamis celebrate the countless unsung heroes of war while at the same time provoking a redefinition of the word "hero" from a human perspective. My question for this book is: What is the definition of a hero in your eyes?

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