La península de las casas vacías

Here is the story of a family's complete disintegration, the dehumanization of a people, the disintegration of a territory, and a peninsula of empty houses. The story of a soldier who cuts open his skin to release the accumulated ash, of a poet who stitches together a girl's shadow after a bombing, and of a teacher who teaches his students to play dead; of a general who sleeps beside the severed hand of a saint, of a blind boy who regains his sight during a blackout, and of a peasant woman who paints all the trees in her orchard black; of a foreign photographer who steps on a landmine near Brunete and doesn't lift his foot for forty years, of a man from Gernika who drives a truck to the center of Paris with the smoldering remains of an air raid, and of a wounded dog whose blood will stain the last stripe of a flag abandoned in Badajoz. Here, then, is the complete story of the Spanish Civil War and of a dying Iberia, where the fantastic underpins the starkness of reality. where the anonymous members of a large clan of olive growers from Jándula cross paths with those of Alberti, Lorca and Unamuno; Rodoreda, Zambrano and Kent; Hemingway, Orwell and Bernanos; Picasso and Mallo; Azaña and Foxá; where the epic and the local intertwine to weave a prodigious tapestry, poetic and grotesque, beautiful and delirious.