Soldiers in the Fog
After Franco’s forces capture Málaga in 1937, young Gustavo Sintora arrives in Madrid to join the Republican army. He becomes part of an entertainment unit which includes a fakir, a person with dwarfism, a gypsy, and a mechanic able to fix any lorry no matter how ancient. He begins a love affair with seamstress Serena Vergara, wife of a militia leader. When the unit is sent to fight on the Ebro front, he is faced with war’s shocking reality and the loss of comrades.
Written without chapters, the novel is in the style of a memoir; Soler looks back to when he was a child and Sintora would visit his former sergeant – the author’s father – to whom he bequeathed notebooks containing an account of his war.
The novel moves seamlessly between italicised extracts and the author’s third-person narrative. At first, I found this disorientating. As the book progresses, however, such a style increases in effectiveness, especially when Republican defeat becomes inevitable: the unit breaks up – each man with his own vision of survival – and Sintora hastens back to Madrid and Serena. With no law and order, the city is in the hands of score-settling militias.
A visceral novel that delves beyond textbook treatments of the Civil War.
