The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain’s Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War

In this sweeping, ambitious debut, journalist Shulman offers a group biography of a family indelibly marked by the Spanish Civil War. He begins with the family’s patriarch, Leopoldo Panero, a noted poet who abandoned the left-wing Republicans to defect to the right-wing Nationalists during the war, eventually rising high in General Franco’s regime to assume the role of unofficial poet laureate. Shulman also profiles in depth Leopoldo’s wife, Felicidad, who endured their troubled marriage—despite proclaiming that “family is sacred!” Leopoldo had many affairs—through an intense, albeit platonic, relationship with another poet. Of their three sons, the oldest, Juan Luis, sought, with limited success, to assume his father’s role after Leopoldo died in 1962; the middle son, Leopoldo Maria, was arrested after urging people not to vote in a pro-Franco referendum in 1967 and later attempted suicide; while the youngest, Michi, descended into alcoholism. In 1976, the year after Franco’s death, a documentary, The Disenchantment, depicted the surviving Paneros grappling with Leopoldo’s legacy; a viewing of the film inspired Shulman to write this book. Prodigiously researched and beautifully written, Shulman’s work reveals a remarkable family of “refreshing weirdness, poetic obsessions, and [a] sacrilegious taste for destruction” as a microcosm of Spain’s tortured 20th century. (Mar.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Michi Panero suffered from mental illness.