Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas

In that house everyone speaks badly about everyone else, and they’re all right,”

ideas and a way of life which, in time and as no-one could have suspected – least of all Sánchez Mazas – would eventually become the way of life and ideas, adopted as a revolutionary shock ideology in the face of the urgencies of the war, later lowered to the status of ideological ornament by the chubby, blustering, effeminate, incompetent, astute and conservative soldier who usurped them, finally becoming the increasingly rotten and meaningless paraphernalia with which a handful of boors struggled for forty gloomy years to justify their shitty regime.