Sebastian Shakespeare
Friends, Fame, and War
The Speed of Light
By Javier Cercas (Translated by Anne McLean)
Bloomsbury 288pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Javier Cercas's first novel, Soldiers of Salamis, addressed the moral confusion of the Spanish Civil War and how it scarred a generation for life. The book was a deserved success and went on to become an international bestseller. His second novel, The Speed of Light, tackles a different conflict, the Vietnam War, and how it affected a generation of idealist Americans in the 1960s.
The story starts off in the 1980s when our young Spanish narrator accepts a teaching post in Urbana in the American Midwest. He tries to impress his new colleagues by rubbishing the films of Pedro Almodóvar (‘Frankly, I think they're a bunch of queer crap’) only to discover that his
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind
'Don’t think of Watergate as being about a break-in, but about what the break-in exposed: dirty ops, dirty tricks, dirty money.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-presidents-mendacity