Si Josep Pla maintains that band of chronicler, of narrator of the most humanistic evolution in Catalan literature, Jose Maria Gironella it would come a few years later to encompass much broader literary spaces from that imprint of a writer who, awakened from the self-taught, ends up raising the creative genius.
Because it is that Gironella wrote a lot and well, as evidenced by his almost forty works, mostly novels, which requires dedication to works of fiction compared to essays, for example.
Of all Gironella's work, readers from all over the world can rejoice in a tetralogy of the Spanish Civil War that reaches that pulse at times Galdosian of intrahistory within History.
And Gironella also accurately and profusely takes us into an entire era fictionalized from the privileged vision of extremely empathetic protagonists, with a scent of transcendental truth.
Many other books, with their varied plots or reflections, could be included in a wonderful bibliographical selection by Gironella, but focusing on the tetralogy, and as a matter of the subscriber's tastes, this is how the thing could remain ...
Top 3 recommended novels by José María Gironella
Cypress trees believe in God
The truth is that to enjoy a series like this, it is always better to recommend sticking to the order. Because, of course, everything has its chronology in this brilliant story of an era and the succession of its gray events...
That the years before the civil war were a pressure cooker between ideologies that were marking factions, is something unquestionable. The question was to know how to capture everything, to make a novel so that a story like this would become a bestseller of its time in many parts of the world.The plot brings us closer to the life of a middle-class family, the Alvears, and from here it goes deepening in all the aspects of the citizen life and of the diverse social layers.
Throughout the work, the reader witnesses the process by which Spain was divided into two irreconcilable sides until it led to the Civil War. In its almost a thousand pages, the waste of settings and the exuberance of disparate characters present us with an essential cosmos to understand everything that came after.
A million dead
It cannot be ignored that Gironella was there, participating in the war itself. And no one better than an eyewitness writer of the events, to abound in the horrors, in the tragedy of man's destructive endeavor in every warlike conflict.
Without a doubt, the proximity to death, stripped of its status as a faction or side, prepared Gironella for a novel loaded with the crude truth of unreason. Second installment of the trilogy that began with The Cypresses Believe in God and continues with Peace Has Exploded. Immense historical fresco that takes place in the middle of the Spanish civil war, treated in both its human, sociological and military aspects, and that covers the two sides in conflict.
On this occasion there are 800 pages in which, if any tendentious aspect could be revealed in the first part, everything now disappears to talk about the horrors, about humanity without further conditions. We continue with the Alvears as the central nucleus but projecting ourselves to many other characters with so much to make us live...
Peace has broken
The calm after the bleeding of the people, after the death of the young soldiers, is precisely that, an explosion in the face. Because the new reality writes for everyone a paradigm of survival that in this final trilogy (the fourth installment called "Men Cry Alone") is quite detached from the general atmosphere.
Being written many years later will have a lot to do with it, with the Alvears accounting for the casualties and recapitulating their existence around what remains, it confronts us with a broken society, facing another great war to the north in which it was never entered, but suffered doubly. What is happening in the general sphere of society after the war and what happens behind the scenes of the Alvears and many other new characters composes once again that magical balance towards a realism also occasionally punctuated by the necessary humor against to the tragic.
