Spanish Civil War January 31, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , trackbackYou know how it is. You read a book on a subject, and then something else pops up on a similar theme, and suddenly the topic is everywhere. Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, set in Barcelona in the forties, was reviewed in this blog almost a year ago. I never did review Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past
Over the weekend, I read Winter in Madrid
The book is set at the height of the Blitz in England when a young soldier has been invalided out, and is asked to go to Spain to spy on an old school friend. He is sent to Madrid, and finds himself caught up in the lives of his old friend, another who is thought to have died during the Civil War and the woman who was the girlfriend of the latter, and has now taken up with the former. As he gets to know Madrid, he becomes more aware of the suffering of its people, and his eyes are opened to Britain’s tacit support of the fascist regime.
Unlike Zafon’s book, the city itself does not come through strongly, and the drama centers far more around the way in which the central British characters have their ideas and values challenged. It is not a story with happy endings, but then not many stories from that time were.
Pan’s Labyrinth is set a couple of years later, and is the story of a young girl, played by Ivana Baquero, who goes with her pregnant mother to stay with her mother’s new husband, a Fascist Captain running down the last vestiges of the Spanish resistance movement in rural Spain. Perhaps she encounters a world where she is the princess who must carry out three tasks to prove her right to her heritage, or perhaps she is just escaping from the horrific world around her into fantasy.
This is not by any means a childrens film, and has some extremely unpleasant scenes, including the Captain stitching his own wound. The fantastic world melds seamlessly into the mundane, and sometimes the mundane seems so horribly cruel it might be fantastic.
Like every Spanish novel or film I can remember, and even the English ‘Winter in Madrid’ the movie features a strong Spanish woman, practical though a little in touch with older or darker ideas, with a sense of loyalty that outweighs everything else. In this case, she is Mercedes, played by Maribel Verdu, a servant and sister of one of the rebels, who’s final revenge on the Captain is not physically violent, but is utterly devastating.
Both the book and the film are highly recommended.
Technorati Tags: pans labyrinth, el labertino del fauno, winter in madrid, spain
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The Spanish Civil War has been in the news in N.Z. lately too, with the publication of a new edition of “Defence of Madrid” by Geoffrey Cox (Otago University Press). I haven’t read the book, but have seen several reviews. It’s an eyewitness account written by a left-wing New Zealand journalist who spent six weeks in beseiged Madrid in 1936, and has been highly praised.