Azaña

the long version

Azaña is not just another book about a civil war. It is an extraordinary portrait of the former president of the Spanish Republic; portrait that, framed in a historical context documented with minute and rigor, transcends the strict biographical value to establish himself as a literary creation of the first magnitude. The author penetrates into history and reveals nuances and chiaroscuro that the simple chronicle would omit; he arrives by paths of poetic tension, to the existential knot of his character. Don Manuel Azaña, exiled in France in the In the last months of his life, he recalls his political action, evokes memories of childhood and youth, lost landscapes, philosophical reflections, literary endeavors, bitterness of exile, relives his harsh discussions with political figures, especially with Negrín; the tense dialectical duel between Azaña and Negrín reveals the deep intimate conflict of that skeptical intellectual, a lucid and tortured spectator as well as a direct protagonist of the disaster of the Republic. Carlos Rojas, a writer of singular and exceptional importance within Spanish literature, has given us an ambitious novel, of an impeccable style, which recreates with astonishing fidelity the peculiar way of speaking and writing of Azaña. A work of indisputable importance that will deeply impress the reader.