novel, Spanish Civil War, tr Nugent & de la Camara
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In order to appreciate Soldiers Cry by Night, the second volume in Matute's 1960s trilogy about the Spanish Civil War, one must have a taste for the dark politically charged magic realism of some Latin American and Iberian fiction. For those who have already read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Isabel Allende, the interior landscape will seem familiar-perhaps too familiar-by the time they read Matute. The plot of the book revolves around the parallel misfortunes of Manuel and Marta, whose lives are shaped by the drama and trauma of the Civil War. After seeing his mother's humiliations and his adoptive father's bullet-ridden body, Manuel himself is sent to a reformatory and then to a prison for his politics. Marta grows to adolescence in a cheap hotel rife with drugs, crime and prostitution. Their eventual fatal and futile attack on government troops is a hopeless gesture hard to ennoble. But the facts of the plot are less telling than Matute's descriptions of of the world in which they occur: church candles burn "quietly and passionately like tongues that have been torn out"; a door closes, leaving "hatred, emptiness and perhaps nausea behind"; and Marta's hands are "like two frightened and cold animals." While the experiences are undoubtedly authentic, based as they are on Matute's own life, as literature, the catalogue of horrors begins to pall. Matute might well be summing up her book when she refers to "the muffled lament of the world," but one is left longing for a redeeming shaft of light in this unremitting gloom.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The first volume of "The Merchants," a highly acclaimed trilogy about the Spanish Civil War published in the Sixties, was translated as The Awakening in 1963. The second volume, here translated for the first time, opens with the news that the first book's mysterious adventurer, Jorge de Son Mayor, has recognized the reformatory kid, Manuel, as his son. Manuel feels that his childhood has been "something ugly, long and dark, with a hundred legs, like a caterpillar," but he is soon hurled into the far uglier world of adults at war. The author, born in Barcelona of Castilian parents in time to experience the civil war firsthand, specializes in depicting its demoralizing effects on children and adolescents. Her style involves flashbacks, temporal jumps, and parenthetically marked free associations. This translation by a pair of academic Hispanists, one of whom has translated several volumes of poetry, is long overdue. Recommended for most collections.
Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An insightful look to the human soul,
By A Customer
This review is from: Soldiers Cry by Night/Los Soldados Lloran De Noche (Discoveries (Latin American Literary Review Pr)) (Paperback)
Why we feel so special about ourselves? Because we know everything about ourselves. Matute reflects here (and in the others books of the trilogy, The Trap and First Memory) how our childhood shapes our future life, and how we cannot do much about it. We can understand our life because we know all things that happened to us, since childhood. Trying to make to understand it to other people is the main problem of living with somebody. Yes, Matute hits the right string inside our souls, and with her wonderful prose, poetically talks about friendship, love and hate, fears and beliefs, during the Spanish civil war. A war that changed the life of the characters of the novel in a very profound way, with no blood nor suffering, but with deep feelings. Only Matute can convince us of the importance of the most secret feelings in our everyday life. I recommend you to read first First Memory, although is not required.
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