For a Sack of Bones [Hardcover]

Lluis-Anton Baulenas (Author), Cheryl Morgan (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 14, 2008

** DEBUT FICTION**

This story, among many other things, is about two men who are gone from the world but are still very much mine. Their deaths occurred after the fighting stopped, but the war still got them in the end.

After eight years in exile, Sergeant Genís Aleu returns to the city of Barcelona bearing the mark of a man who has seen many battles—and who has one last mission ahead of him. A soldier in the infamous foreign legion, Aleu cuts a fearsome figure as he negotiates around the paranoid and suspicious citizens of Franco’s Spain, single-mindedly trying to fulfill his father’s dying wish.

This story is also about keeping promises.
And it’s about revenge.


But beneath the gruff and gritty life of a legionnaire are echoes of Niso—Aleu as a young boy in a charity orphanage—and Niso’s passionate devotion to his family, the ideals of his country, and the possibility of a better future.

Now, as the people of Spain struggle to survive under the thumb of Fascist oppression, Aleu hurtles toward his own reckoning with the truth of war and the dangerous effects of living a lie.

(20080801)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in Franco Spain in 1949, Barcelona novelist and playwright Baulenas's revenge tale of Legionnaire Sgt. Genís Aleu is drenched in desolation, fear and cruelty. After his father, Juan, enlisted to fight Franco, Genís was raised in a religious charity ward. Years later, former POW Juan, near death, extracts a grim, quixotic promise from Genís. He is to recover Juan's friend's remains from the POW camp and give them a decent burial in Barcelona. After eight years in Franco's celebrated Spanish Foreign Legion, Genís travels to the POW camp turned military base to fulfill his promise. Despite his professed loyalty, Genís actually seethes with a hatred for Franco that's fueled by his obsession to avenge his father. The bleak political struggles roiling the country bring to mind Darkness at Noon, while the soldiers' banter and ribald humor is of the Hemingway school. And though Genís's zealous devotion to his dead father (and the self-destructive lengths he goes to in following through on his promise) sometimes confounds, the narrative overall is brisk, tense and satisfyingly complex. (July)
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—This compelling story, set during both the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime, is told from alternating perspectives by the narrator as a boy and as a soldier. Niso grows up in an orphanage after his father joins the fight against the Fascists and his mother can no longer provide for him. Though he is surrounded by cruelty, the boy is both innocent and hopeful. However, his story as a child foreshadows who he is to become. On his deathbed, Niso's father extracts a promise from his son to retrieve the bones of the man who protected him from prison camp and provide him with a proper burial. After eight years as a member of the fearsome Foreign Legion, Sergeant Aleu returns to Spain and sets out with grim determination to fulfill his father's wish. Amid a cast of desperate, treacherous, and hopeless characters, Aleu tirelessly works to recover the bones of his father's friend. Suspense builds as readers are introduced to characters they fear will lead to Aleu's downfall. The powerful story engages readers' emotions while hurtling them toward the heartbreaking climax.—Jane Ritter, Mill Valley School District, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (July 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151012555
• ISBN-13: 978-0151012558
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,105,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gritty and compelling page-turner, July 31, 2008

By 

sean s. (montreal) - See all my reviews

This review is from: For a Sack of Bones (Hardcover)

Barcelona novelist Lluis-Anton Baulenas' For a Sack of Bones recently won Catalonia's highest literary award, the Ramon Llull prize, for this most satisfying read.

The novel is a gripping and compelling page-turner than not only conveys vividly the tragedy of the Spanish civil war and the subsequent dictatorship, but also the moral quagmires which so many Spaniards and Catalans were forced to endure, often as a matter of simple survival. It is flabbergasting to think that Barcelona, arguably the most cutting edge city in the world today, was until the mid-1970s under the boot of a brutal dictatorship.

As in France during World War II, there were oppressors and there were oppressed, but sometimes the line between the two was precariously thin.

The main protagonist of For a Sack of Bones, Sergeant Genis Aleu, is in a moral grey zone, pursuing a quixotic mission to fulfill his father's dying wish. However, the road to achieving this goal threatens his own moral integrity, and even his life.

In its review of the book, the Toronto Star (July 13, 2008) commented that 'Baulenas is an accomplished storyteller whose narrative never falters, never veers off-course, never relinquishes its hold on the reader'.

Baulenas keeps the pressure mounting throughout the narrative, to a highly-charged conclusion ultimately reminiscent of Greek tragedy.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A hard-earned victory of memory over forgetting, February 24, 2011

By 

S. Smith-Peter (Staten Island, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: For a Sack of Bones (Hardcover)

This is a compelling page turner about Franco's dictatorship and how it attempted to destroy Catalan people and culture. Although the content is tough and sometimes violent, it reads like a thriller. Each chapter made me want to start the next right away. The story is about a boy, Genis Aleu, whose father asks him to find the bones of his friend in a concentration camp, where he and others who supported the Spanish Republic were sent after the Fascist victory of Franco's forces. Genis's life is dedicated to fulfilling his father's last wish and in the process he discovers a scandal that could bring down high placed people in Franco's regime.

One of the themes of the book is how Franco's regime attempted and mostly succeeded in destroying any private life or thoughts that might possibly be dissident or even just different. Closely related is the theme of how even those trying to do the right thing are destroyed, either morally or physically or both, and they bring down others with them even if they never meant to. This is also a totalitarian regime, and friendship and family are suspect as alternate sources of meaning.

The book is written in Catalan, which was forbidden and repressed under Franco. The author has an afterward explaining the history and present situation with the language, which is spoken in Catalonia.

The end is not a happy one, and yet it can be read as a victory of memory over forgetting, of family over regime, of culture over destruction.