Franco's Crypt

Resumen del libro

An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural artifacts of Franco's Spain

History is written by the victors: It's a cliché, but a reliable one except in the case of the Spanish Civil War. Here, it is the losers' version of events that has been believed. In his groundbreaking new book, Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936, Jeremy Treglown argues that the result has been a double distortion.
Inside Spain, as well as outside, many believe wrongly that under Francisco Franco's 1939 75 dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. And this myth reinforces another: that there was and continues to be a national pact to forget what really happened. As a result, foreign narratives For Whom the Bell Tolls, Casablanca, Homage to Catalonia still have greater credibility than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de España was, as its name asserts, Spain's own war, and in recent years the country has begun to reclaim this crucial aspect of its modern history.
Franco's Crypt reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at what's actually there monuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies, computer games and 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.

Biografía del autor

Jeremy Treglown (Reino Unido, 1946) es un consolidado crítico y biógrafo. Formado en Oxford, ha sido durante muchos años profesor en la universidad y editor del Times Literary Supplement, aparte de colaborar con otros medios. Ha escrito biografías de Roald Dahl, Henry Green y V.S. Pritchett, y actualmente es profesor de estudios de literatura comparada en la universidad de Warwick.