Customer Reviews

For a Sack of Bones

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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.

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.