Fosa común

the long version

Unmarked Grave—alluding to a place of oblivion and the unfair capriciousness of memory—starts in the years of Spanish transition with the clean, intimate, and entertaining narration of Jaime Arzain: a teenager in the trance of discovering love, sex, friendship, music, and literature in a military province while the country watches the collapse of Francoism, the first constitutional elections, and the constant attacks by ETA in an environment of fear, hope, and confusion. Years later, a mature Arzain returns to the buried city to converse with the shadows of his past, recalling the ruins of a lost world and facing that time in his life, at once recovered and disappointed, as if the whole experience would unexpectedly take on a posthumous nature. Finally, the author himself carries out an exhaustive and absorbing investigation of the case that has appeared throughout the novel but not yet presented in detail: the 1975 murder of a mother and her four children at the hands of the father, an army captain. This contemptibly silenced massacre is the embodiment of an intimate and collective moral experience. Unmarked Grave, as full of humor as gravity, confirms that Javier Pastor is one of the most ambitious and radical writers of contemporary Spanish literature.