Books Burn Badly

“Even when things fall quiet, there are two classes of silence. A friendly silence that keeps us company, where words can be at leisure, and another silence. One that frightens.” Silence lies at the heart of the latest novel from Galician journalist Rivas (The Carpenter’s Pencil). In 1936, Franco’s Falangists burned books in Coruña’s María Pita Square and at the docks that supplied the Galician city’s livelihood of fish, trade, and shipping. Rivas’s novel is teeming with voices—the unbeatable boxer who worked as a plumber, Arturo da Silva; his “sentimental sparring partner,” Vicente Curtis, burdened with the nickname “Hercules son of a whore” since he was a boy; the impossibly sweet voiced tango singer, Luís Terranova; Olinda, the quick-fingered matchstick maker–turned–saboteur–turned–washerwoman. Each narrative alone might have furnished a novel. The hole burnt into the city’s intellectual center smolders and spreads under Franco for decades, devouring the talent, sanity, memory, morality, and lives of an entire generation. Francisco Crecente, known as “Polka,” a gardener and sometime bagpipe player, is forced to rake and bury the charred books. He’s imprisoned, sent to a labor camp, and becomes a gravedigger. The soldiers who set the books ablaze ascend to power to become an unscrupulous censor, a corrupt inspector, and a fanatical judge. Children grow up stuttering (afraid to speak) or lazy eyed (refusing to see). They finger the charred edges of the books their parents salvaged and hid, searching for answers to unanswerable questions, helpless to recover either individual stories or the collective history lost to the flames. Making sense of the lively crowd of characters and not strictly linear structure can be as confusing as sorting unbound half-burned pages, but attentive readers will be rewarded by a rare find: an epic and resoundingly lyrical refutation of totalitarianism and cruelty. (Oct.)