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Cargando... A Moment of War (1991)por Laurie Lee
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Lee had made his way to Spain. After travelling around the country before being evacuated home by the navy after the Spanish Civil War erupted. Back home in Gloucestershire Lee felt drawn to those fighting the Republican cause, and makes the decision to head back to Spain. Arriving in Perpignan in Southern France he is unable to find anyone to help him get across the border so decides to take a risk and cross the Pyrenees in a snowstorm. After somehow making it safely across the mountains, he is arrested and imprisoned for being a spy. On the day that his execution was scheduled for, a chance encounter meant that he was released. Lee quickly joins the International Brigade, along with a motley rabble of men from all over the UK and other parts of Europe who felt drawn to the anti-fascist cause too. He was then given limited training, but was arrested again as a brief trip to Morocco when he was in Spain previously had made him a marked man. He saw very little service, but did travel around to a few locations in the back of an army truck. After the first bombing of a town where he was staying, the realities of the harshness of war, stripped away any romantic notions that he may have still harboured about the fight that he had volunteered for. He has some very near misses, and the impression that you get from the Spanish is that they were not particularly enamoured about having soldiers of other nationalities there, as this was an internal fight that they had to go through. The book is written in Lee’s distinct eloquent style again, making this a pleasure to read even though the subject is not particularly savoury and a fitting end to the series. As a impressionable young man Lee wanted to fight alongside the Spanish as a volunteer during their civil war in 1937. He made the trek across the Pyrenees expecting Spain to welcome him to the conflict with arms wide open. Much to his surprise he was immediately arrested as a spy. So begins Lee's memoir of a naive coming of age in wartime Spain. Throughout this short little memoir Lee's disillusionment becomes stronger and stronger until when he is finally sent home he has this last parting shot: "Here were the names of the dead heroes, piled into little cardboard boxes, never to be inscribed later in official Halls of Remembrance" (p 174). Sad. A short but poetic addition to the previous autobiography. The author recounts his memories of a brief time in Spain fighting for the republicans against General Franco and the fascists. An interesting insight into the suspicion, banality and eventually swift brutality of modern war. It felt like a very real experience, although reading the foreward after I'd finished the book there is some debate about whether or not it was. It was still a good read though and thought provoking in some of its insights.
But in "A Moment of War," you sense that there was no order anywhere in Spain and that a different kind of narrative is required, a story told in "gritty, throwaway lines -- quietly savage, but with no dramatics." In paragraph after paragraph, scene after scene of this book, the reader comes upon terse non sequiturs, because the only pattern in Mr. Lee's experience of the Spanish Civil War was its lack of pattern. Even the climactic moment, the one scene of battle, expires in derangement: "I headed for the old barn where I'd spent my first night. I lay in a state of sick paralysis. I had killed a man, and remembered his shocked, angry eyes . . . I began to have hallucinations and breaks in the brain . . . Was this then what I'd come for, and all my journey had meant -- to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?" Pertenece a las seriesPertenece a las series editorialesDistinciones
A memoir of the Spanish Civil War with "the plainness of Orwell but the metaphorical soaring of a poem . . . An extraordinary book" (The New York Times Book Review). In December 1937 I crossed the Pyrenees from France--two days on foot through the snow. I don't know why I chose December; it was just one of a number of idiocies I committed at the time. Such was Laurie Lee's entry into the Spanish Civil War. Six months after the Nationalist uprising forced him to leave the country he had grown to love, he returned to offer his life for the Republican cause. It seemed as simple as knocking on a farmhouse door in the middle of the night and declaring himself ready to fight. It would not be the last time he was almost executed for being a spy. In that bitter winter in a divided Spain, Lee's youthful idealism came face to face with the reality of war. The International Brigade he sought to join was not a gallant fighting force, but a collection of misfits without proper leadership or purpose. Boredom and bad food and false alarms were as much a part of the experience of war as actual battle. And when the decisive moment finally came--the moment of him or the enemy--it left Lee feeling the very opposite of heroic. The final volume in Laurie Lee's acclaimed autobiographical trilogy--preceded by Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning--is a clear-eyed and vital snapshot of a young man, and a proud nation, at a historic crossroads. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)914.60481History and Geography Geography and Travel Geography of and travel in Europe Spain, Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal SpainClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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No, I didn't 'enjoy' this book. But I'm glad I've read it as a contribution to my understanding of a bitter period of Spanish history. ( )