The Speed of Light: A Novel (La Velocidad de la luz) [Paperback]

Javier Cercas (Author), Anne McLean (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2007

Javier Cercas' third and most ambitious novel has already been heralded in Spain as "daring," "magnificent, complex, and intense," and "a master class in invention and truth."As a young writer, the novel's protagonist--perhaps an apocryphal version of Cercas himself--accepts a post at a Midwestern university and soon he is in the United States, living a simple life, working and writing. It will be years before he understands that his burgeoning friendship with the Vietnam vet Rodney Falk, a strange and solitary man, will reshape his life, or that he will become obsessed with Rodney's mysterious past.
 
Why does Rodney shun the world? Why does he accept and befriend the narrator? And what really happened at the mysterious 'My Khe' incident? Many years pass with these questions unanswered; the two friends drift apart. But as the narrator's literary career takes off, his personal life collapses. Suddenly, impossibly, the novelist finds that Rodney's fate and his own are linked, and the story spirals towards its fascinating, surreal conclusion. Twisting together his own regrets with those of America, Cercas weaves the profound and personal story of a ghostly past.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An unnamed narrator's life comes full circle as he confronts buried secrets and tragedy in this powerful novel by Spanish author Cercas (Soldiers of Salamis). The unnamed narrator, a young writer whose hustle to survive in Barcelona doesn't leave him time to write, takes a scholarship as an assistant Spanish professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, in the late 1980s. Once there he makes an unlikely friend in office mate Rodney Falk, a Vietnam vet who everyone else in the department thinks is insane. After Rodney disappears during winter break, the narrator visits Rodney's father, who fills him in on Rodney's troubled past. Back in Spain a year later, the narrator becomes a successful novelist, but remains haunted by Rodney (and his skeletons) which the narrator wants to write into a novel. From the electric passages chronicling the narrator's descent into writerly paralysis to his discovery of Rodney's miserable end and then his own creative resurrection, Cercas writes with verve and brings the novel to a close in a mad sardonic swoop. Cercas has delivered a wry and touching examination of the ruinous effects of war and fame. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

A novelist strongly resembling Cercas (they've written the same books and lived in the same places) recounts this cautionary tale of mishandled success foretold by Rodney Falk, a fellow teaching assistant at the University of Illinois. When the young writer achieves literary acclaim back in his native Spain, his monstrous ego soon destroys everything of importance to him. Grasping for purchase in the world, he attempts to track down his old classroom comrade and perhaps tell his story. He even tries the Vietnam vet's life on for size but finds it doesn't fit the way he imagined it might. They've both committed unspeakable atrocities, and Cercas explores what it is to rebuild amid the psychic rubble. He playfully suggests writing may hold the seeds of salvation as well as destruction. As Rodney puts it, "If you don't yet know what you want to say but you're crazy enough or desperate enough or brave enough to keep writing, you might end up saying something that only you can come to know, and that might be of interest." Indeed. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First Edition edition (April 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596912146
• ISBN-13: 978-1596912144
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,892,253 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Vietnam War novel set in Barcelona and Illinois, written by a Spaniard, December 5, 2009

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Speed of Light (Paperback)

Having now made five or six attempts at beginning this review, I am coming to the conclusion that THE SPEED OF LIGHT is a particularly difficult book to review. So I will try a somewhat pointillistic approach and hope that some sort of picture emerges.

There are two protagonists. First, the anonymous narrator, who is a writer from Barcelona. At the time of his tale (2005?), he is in his forties. The second is Rodney Falk, a Vietnam war veteran who spent the 35 years after the war trying to put his war experiences behind him and somehow carve out a stable life for himself. The two of them meet in the late '80s when they share an office as teaching assistants in the Spanish Department at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Against all odds, they end up forging a friendship, albeit a strange and sometimes strained one.

There are two main settings: Barcelona and its environs, and Urbana, Illinois and a town not far away, Rantoul. The first half of the story takes place in the late '80s, with much of that consisting of the narrator learning some (but not all) of Rodney Falk's harrowing and traumatic experiences in Vietnam. The second half of the novel takes place around 2002 to 2004, when Rodney Falk reappears in the narrator's life after 14 years and the narrator learns even more about his time in Vietnam.

The novel is elaborately plotted. It also is ornately told. It is marked (some might say "marred") by long, baroque sentences, many lengthened by numerous conjunctions, others by a thicket of subordinate clauses. In my opinion, it is over-written.

The theme that almost all readers will note and remember has to do with the American experience in Vietnam and how it scarred so many of the American soldiers who survived the fighting. It is both astonishing and disconcerting to find a Spaniard writing so close to the raw quick about that episode of the American experience, both in Southeast Asia and here at home. I believe THE SPEED OF LIGHT to be a worthy addition to the literature of Vietnam and its aftermath in the United States.

Another theme has to do with success and failure in one's career, and since the narrator is a writer, the question of success and failure for him also entails the questions of what it is to be a writer and what's more important to a novel -- the telling or the truth. I found this theme much less convincingly or memorably handled.

Yet another theme or issue -- not as obvious as the first two or as persistent -- concerns the ethics of journalism. A question posed by the novel is: which is more important, people or The Truth? When, for example, journalists get on the trail of a 35-year-old story about Tiger Force, an autonomous U.S. platoon that essentially acted as an American guerrilla force, are there any ethical qualms about hounding, in the name of The Truth, former American soldiers who have struggled for years to put the past behind them and for whom publicity will ruin them? (To my mind, it is a somewhat loaded question -- because The Truth is an illusion. That doesn't mean that journalists or historians should not make a valiant effort to approximate it nonetheless, but it does mean, to me, that there are ethical limits to that effort, that individual lives should not be cavalierly sacrificed before the altar of The Truth.)

One last comment: Is it just me (or a statistical aberration pertaining to the modern novels I have recently been reading), or has it become vogue to tell novels through an anonymous first-person narrator? This device is not limited to those writing in Spanish (my beloved and esteemed W.G. Sebald employs it, although his narrator is more a spectator than an active protagonist in the traditional sense), but it does seem to be particularly prevalent in Spanish-language fiction. I can well understand the attractions of writing in the first person, but I don't understand what is gained by denying that first-person narrator a name. Furthermore, the device is becoming somewhat hackneyed.

THE SPEED OF LIGHT has many flaws -- too many to keep me from giving it five stars. But it has considerable merits as well, and -- in keeping with the ambivalent nature of this review -- I don't mean to discourage anyone from reading it.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves..., October 19, 2007

By 

Youkali "Youkali" (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Speed of Light: A Novel (La Velocidad de la luz) (Paperback)

I can't think of a better novel about Viet Nam, or, for that matter, about all the wars since Korea. And it's set in Urbana and Barcelona. I'd say go figure, but then GUARD OF HONOR, perhaps the best novel about WWII, was set in Florida. Maybe it's because Moltke the Elder was right when he said "Everything in war is very simple." Life is different.

4.0 out of 5 stars A meditation on atrocity, January 1, 2012

By 

Aidan J. McQuade (Ireland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Speed of Light: A Novel (Paperback)

The Speed of Light uses the same author-in-search-of-a-story device as Javier Cercas's previous novel Soldiers of Salamis. At its core the book is a meditation on how war breeds atrocity and the consequences of atrocity on the perpetrators - the murdered are barely mentioned and only fleetingly considered.

However while a gripping read it ultimately is significantly less satisfying a book than the author's earlier one about the Spanish Civil War. As one of the characters says to the narrator in The Speed of Light - "you can't understand because you haven't killed". And because the author - presumably not a killer either - does not understand he cannot explain. Instead he describes, recounts and tries to empathise. This is an honourable exercise, but it provides little insight to this subject. Furthermore the author's blurring of the distinction between himself and his protagonist leads, I found, to great difficulty in trusting the account itself and hence the insight the author offers.

Nevertheless the book is elegantly written and translated, and it is thought-provoking. Perhaps it will lead some to revisit actual histories of the Vietnam war, particularly "Four Hours at My Lai", which deals much more directly and insightfully with the realities of war-crimes.