Line of fire, by Arturo Pérez Reverte

For a writer of historical fictions, where the fiction outweighs the informativeness of the story, it is impossible to abstract from civil wars as a setting and argument. Because in that museum of horrors that is all fratricidal confrontationThe most transcendent intrahistories, the most brutal flashes of humanity among the filth of warfare, end up emerging.

From Hemingway but also Javier FencesMany have been the authors who approached their novels about Spain in red and blue as a sinister power game. Now it's up to Arturo Perez Reverte transit that time made a sanctuary full of victims and martyrs, of heroes and heroines. We only have to immerse ourselves in a dark night in which everything begins ...

Synopsis

On the night of July 24 to 25, 1938, during the Battle of the Ebro, 2.890 men and 14 women of the XI Mixed Brigade of the Army of the Republic crossed the river to establish the bridgehead of Castellets del Segre, where they will fight during ten days. However, neither Castellets, nor the XI Brigade, nor the troops that face him in Line of fire they never existed.

The military units, places and characters that appear in this novel are fictitious, although the facts and the real names from which they are inspired are not. It was exactly like this that parents, grandparents and relatives of many Spaniards of today fought on both sides during those days and those tragic years.

The battle of the Ebro was the hardest and bloodiest of all that have been fought on our soil, and about it there is abundant documentation, war reports and personal testimonies.

With all this, combining rigor and invention, the most widely read author in current Spanish literature has built, not a novel about the Civil War, but a formidable novel of men and women in any war: a fair and fascinating story where he recovers the memory of our parents and grandparents, which is also our own history.

With Line of fire, Arturo Pérez-Reverte places the reader with overwhelming realism among those who, voluntarily or by force, were not in the rear, but fighting on both sides on the battle fronts. In Spain many excellent novels have been written about that contest from different ideological positions, but none like this one. Never before has the Civil War been told like this.

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