Book Description

This novel of the Spanish Civil War, winner of the French Academy's 1960 Prix du Roman, deceptively conventional in its scheme and in its romanticism; actually speaks to us on more than a single level of meaning. On the most apparent, we have an almost too recognizable protagonist, Juanito Sanchez, a child of the Valencian huerta, thrown into the conflict while still in his teens. Although unrelated to the nonheroes of today's fashionable novels, his heroism is for the most part unspectacular and encompasses endurance, growth, an increase in his understanding of his relation to others and to the world. At home in the rich, untended farmland his widowed mother sits praying to Valencia's ancient Virgin of the Forsaken that this son be spared. After many vicissitudes, he returns to the huerta. So it is rather in the manner of his survival that the novel, with its existentialist overtones, reaches its true meaning and distinction. For there is in this boy some of that natural goodness and purity which Melville's Billy Budd possessed and part of his diplomat - author's achievement is to have made this quality believable, as well as the capacity of others to recognize and respond to it. Some of these are rather unlikely characters to make such response - notably Agustin, the political commissar of Juanito's regiment, whose commitment is less political than philosophical and becomes more so as the fortunes of the Republic wane. Others do so understandably, such as Encarnacion, a woman whose husband and father-in-law have been taken hostage by the Nationalists just before Juanito's troops occupy their village. Intellectuals and liberals, symbolically caught in no man's land, their dilemma is not resolved other than by death for the sick husband. Encarnacion's becoming pregnant by Juanito also takes on symbolic value.