jjupille's reviews
473 reviews

I don't know what else to give it but 5 stars. Wow - breathtaking. It just keeps echoing around in my ear and in my guts.

It's good. Unfortunately, the suggestions at the end seem to depend at least in part on the US being one of the good guys ...

I learned to much from this book - I feel like it gave me a great foundation for understanding modern Spain. The thesis is that (elite corruption + elite corruption) --> social division, as per the subtitle. The Spanish people are given quite a blanket pass in this account. Sociological francoism is sort of brushed off, and the people don't really have all that much agency.

The last few chapters were really just page after page after page of corruption scandals in the post-Franco era. I get it. And I certainly see the continuities. But it just felt like he wanted to write all of these stories and so they all went in and were left in. Over the 150 years or so of the book, things sometimes get way too "inside baseball" as we say in the US - too detailed, sometimes really down in the weeds.

The writing style is interesting. On the one hand, it can be pretty exhilerating. He mostly writes well. On the other hand, sometimes the style of pivoting through different topics creates non sequiturs. As a writer studying this in part for Preston's style I could see the writerly artifice behind it. It's mostly great but, again, it can be overdone. 

It did what it needed to do, helping me understand more about the encounter of the western Roman world and the Moors between the fall of the Empire and Charlemagne, obvs. with special attention to the Franks, Clovis, Tours. 

I just didn't love it. It got didactic in places. I could see the writerly techniques too much.

Koestler's Act of Creation and Ghost in the Machine are really important books for me. i have sometimes called him my intellectual hero. But I didn't like Darkness at Noon very much, and this is extraordinarily important future-history reportage, but not very well written. The places where he waxes philosophical about time and death are extremely well-situated (in prison condemned to death by the Spanish fascist rebels). But they're pretty banal, some real clunkers in there.

I don't know Spanish Civil War (nor general history) very well. This was a good easy introduction to the Civil War, and I found some of the historical background and sociological analysis (e.g., that Spain was still more or less feudal across substantial swathes, and the the Church didn't really think the Inquisition was all that bad). I would like to learn more.

The best deliverable for me was analysis of "the method of terror" deployed by the fascists. He elaborates this on pp. 80-83. He has hold of a Francoist document enumerating five points around how to "instil a certain sulatory terror into the population" (p. 81). It explicitly calls for local authorities to get straightened out quickly at pain of their own and their famillies' deaths. "In every case the methods resorted to must be of a clearly spectacular and impressive character", etc. Really chilling stuff.

So Koestler is really good at showing the terrifying violence the Francist rebels were deploying. 50,000 slaughtered, I guess. 5,000 over a few bloody months in Malaga.

I also didn't know the Falangists deployed "Moors" to sow special terror, and it seems in particular were used for sexual violence and other especially terrorizing acts. AK rightly calls out the irony of Torquemadian Catholics deploying Moors on Spanish soil.

The final thing that kep jumping out at me was how clear it was to Koestler that the proceedings in Spain were mere prelude to the next great war. He put pen down in late summer 1937, edited the book in the early fall. Was that the case for any educated European at this time? I have huge holes in my reading in this period.

Anyway, I am going to Spain for the last 4-5 months of 2025 and will read more. This was OK to start.

Unbelievably great.