Another Damn Novel about the Spanish Civil War!<\/i> provides an interesting take on the nature of writing and revision. On its most immediate level, Another Damn Novel<\/i> is simply a re-release of Isaac Rosa\u2019s first novel The Bad Memory<\/i>, which was published when the author was just twenty-five. <\/p>\n
Flawed, yet engaging\u2014at least in the opinion of the author himself\u2014The Bad Memory<\/i> takes place in 1977 and tells the story of Julian Santos: a man hired by a mysterious widow to ghostwrite her war criminal husband\u2019s autobiography. Santos’s search into his subject’s past leads him to discover the secret town Alcahaz, which has been erased from all official records, and causes him to relive his experiences as a child during the Spanish Civil War. <\/p>\n
What distinguishes Another Damn Novel<\/i> from its predecessor, and makes the book a fun read, is that in this re-release, each chapter closes with an anonymous reader\u2019s disparaging but humorous criticism of Rosa\u2019s writing style and techniques that can be extended and seen as a critique of mainstream, realistic writing as a whole.<\/p>\n
No character, word, or quote is safe from Rosa\u2019s scathing self-criticism. This anonymous reader rips apart every aspect of the novel, wittily revealing interesting insights into the writing process and shortcomings of conventional novels. He jokes about the Moleskine journals that \u201cwriters\u201d can\u2019t live without, the author\u2019s inability to create believable female characters, and the author\u2019s habit of constructing whole chapters around bizarre words chosen at random from an encyclopedia. <\/p>\n
For example, here\u2019s what the anonymous reader has to say following a chapter in which the protagonist\u2014through luck and a series of coincidences\u2014discovers the town he\u2019s been searching for:<\/p>\n
\nFate, the easy way out for bad writers. Chance, the unforeseen, a turn of luck, deus ex machina that in this case is aided by infallible intuition, by a hunch that helps the journey move along. Fate fatefully reveals the fateful existence of Alcahaz through a photo that fatefully falls from a book chosen by fate (well, actually, a photo prettily \u201cborn from the womb of the book\u201d). And if fate isn\u2019t enough, the protagonist\u2019s resolute intuition enters the game, the hunch that there is something curious about this place, accented by the widow\u2019s revelation that her husband\u2019s voice \u201clightly trembled\u201d upon speaking the name, and that \u201che became furious, he told me to shut up, he lost his temper.\u201d Hmm, how curious, the protagonist will think, we imagine him raising an eyebrow and stroking his beard. What infuriated him and made him tremble upon speaking the name? Hmm, hmm, there could be something here, we shall see, we shall see. [Translation mine.]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Although Rosa jokes in the introduction that the impertinent critic is trying to \u201csabotage\u201d his work, the re-writing of The Bad Memory<\/i> becomes the central aspect of the novel. But it would be too simplistic to portray this as just a clever exercise in metafiction. Instead Rosa\u2019s desire to rewrite his first novel reflects the novel\u2019s plot (Santos\u2019 ghostwriting of the war criminal\u2019s autobiography) and explores Spain\u2019s desire to rewrite its own violent past.<\/p>\n
By drawing so much attention to his \u201cbad writing,\u201d Rosa runs a risk of alienating his audience. Who really wants to read 200 pagse of a crappy novel just to enjoy some snarky comments? But by linking up to the Spanish tradition of Civil War novels with a narrative that\u2019s actually compelling, the still up-and-coming Rosa mostly avoids this problem, creating a book that\u2014as a meditation on the nature of authorship, as a story about the Civil War\u2014can be enjoyed on several levels. <\/p>\n
Another Damn Novel about the Spanish Civil War!<\/i>
\nBy Isaac Rosa
\nUntranslated
\nSeix Barral
\n432 pp., 20,50 euros<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another Damn Novel about the Spanish Civil War! provides an interesting take on the nature of writing and revision. On its most immediate level, Another Damn Novel is simply a re-release of Isaac Rosa\u2019s first novel The Bad Memory, which was published when the author was just twenty-five. Flawed, yet engaging\u2014at least in the opinion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[4406,1836,4396,1646,1336],"class_list":["post-254566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-another-damn-novel-about-the-spanish-civil-war","tag-cwp","tag-isaac-rosa","tag-review","tag-untranslated"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363266,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254566\/revisions\/363266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}