The anatomy of a moment

Description

"Javier Cercas quería escribir una novela sobre 23 F, pero tras reunir toda la información existente sobre ese momento decisivo de la reciente historia de España, se dio cuenta que ninguna ficción podía hacer justicia al material que tenía entre manos. Así a partir de un iinstante que reúne tres gestos valientes, el de Adolfo Suárez, el de Gutiérrez Mellado y el de Santiago Carrillo, que en medio de las balas disparadas por los secuestradores del congreso se resistieron a lanzarse al suelo eel día del golpe de estado, Cercas arma un extraordinario relato, usando ese instante como una mirilla a través de la cual se puede contemplar una época y un país. Con un conocimiento absoluto de las fuentes documentales y un magistral dominio de las herramientas y los recursos del narrador, logra enhebrar en un libro fascinante, la mejor crónica de una jornada decisiva, logrando que al repasar los hechos de aquel día y los acontecimientos que llevaron a él, el lector se sumerja en un tiempo, un ambiente y unas circunstancias. Sin duda alguna estamos ante la obra fundamental de la transición española"--Librairie hispa.

Description

"The best history book at the year"--Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Times Literary Supplement (UK). "A masterpiece of twenty-first-century European Literature."--Jordi Gracia, El Pais. In February 1981, Spain, still emerging from Franco's shadow, was in the process of electing a new prime minister. On the day of the vote in Parliament, while the session was being filmed by TV cameras, a band of right-wing soldiers burst in with automatic weapons, ordering everyone down. Only three men defied the order. For thirty-five minutes, as bullets flew and cameras rolled, they stayed in their seats. Javier Cercas originally set out to write a work of fiction about this pivotal event but determined it had already gained an air of myth, or, through the annual broadcast of video clips, had at least acquire the fictional taint of reality television. Instead, Cercas employs vivid descriptions of that archival footage to frame a true narrative of the attempted coup, which he comes to understand as a last gasp of the bloody civil war four decades earlier. Traversing the line between history and art, Cercas creates an incisive literary inquest into national myth, personal memory, political spectacle, and reality itself. His account of a watershed modent in Spain's history is a contemporary masterpiece of Spanish literature. "With this noval, Javier Cercas takes his place in the select group at the forefront of Spanish literature."--Roberto Bolano. "A masterly parable of political violence, of suffering, but also, and decisively, of the strange locic of compassion and healing ... [Soldiers of Salamis] should become a classic."--George Steiner. "This book is magnificent ... One of the best I've read in a long time."--Mario Vargas Llosa, El Pais --Book Jacket.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The anatomy of a moment: thirty-five minutes in history and imaginationNew York2011-01-01
• Anatomía de un instanteMondadori2009-01-01
• Anatomía de un instanteDebolsillo2010-01-01
• Anatomia de un instante / The Anatomy of a Moment (Spanish Edition)PaperbackRandom House Mondadori2011-01-01
• The Anatomy of a MomentHardcoverBloomsbury UK2011-03-01
• Anatomía de un instanteEl País, S. L.2012-01-01