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An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural artifacts of Franco's SpainTrue, false, or both?
Spain's 1939-75 dictator, Francisco Franco, was a pioneer of water conservation and sustainable energy.
Pedro Almod+¦var is only the most recent in a line of great antiestablishment film directors who have worked continuously in Spain since the 1930s.
As early as 1943, former Republicans and Nationalists were collaborating in Spain to promote the visual arts, irrespective of the artists' political views.
Censorship can benefit literature.
Memory is not the same thing as history.
Inside Spain as well as outside, many believewronglythat under Franco's fascist dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. In his groundbreaking new book, Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936, Jeremy Treglown argues that oversimplifications like these of a complicated, ambiguous actuality have contributed to a separate falsehood: that there was and continues to be a national pact to forget the evils for which Franco's side (and, according to this version, his side alone) was responsible.The myth that truthfulness was impossible inside Franco's Spain may explain why foreign narratives (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia) have seemed more credible than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de Espa+¦a was, as its Spanish name asserts, Spain's own war, and in recent years the country has begun to make a more public attempt to 'reclaim' its modern history of fascism. How it is doing so, and the role played in the process by notions of historical memory, are among the subjects of this wide-ranging and challenging book.Franco's Crypt reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at what's actually theremonuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies, video gamesand considers, in a captivating narrative, the totality of what it shows. The result is a much-needed reexamination of a history we only thought we knew.


From Booklist


Literary scholar Treglown, author of acclaimed biographies of Roald Dahl, Henry Green, and V. S. Pritchett, here offers a thoughtful, erudite hand grenade of a book that takes issue with contemporary narratives about Spanish cultural life during the Franco dictatorship (1939-75). Examining various works of fiction, journalism, and art, as well as public controversies about museums, graveyards, and other centers of historical gravity, Treglown argues that our understanding of culture under Franco has (ironically) been muddied by efforts to cultivate cultural memory of the period. Such efforts have, he suggests, been weakened by 'sentimental politicization, escapism, complacency, and ignorance' as well as the general unreliability of memory, and the result is (again, ironically) both a persistent cultural amnesia and an unhealthy fixation on the past. Whether or not they share his concerns about cultural memory, readers interested in postwar Spanish art, literature, or politics will appreciate and likely learn from Treglown's deep knowledge of these subjects. --Brendan Driscoll


Review


'A discerning, provocative book, part travelogue, part reflection on how memory passes into history, and part cultural narrative, Franco's Crypt establishes that much more was going on during Franco's regime than is usually credited. Touching on prickly issues with the pragmatic detachment of a foreigner, Mr. Treglown shows that subversive elements were at play in art, literature and cinema, and that a cautious yet irreversible process of modernity had begun long before Franco's death . . . Franco's Crypt [is] an unflinching