AS MINISTERS in Madrid and national-ists in Catalonia swap rival narratives, events in Spain confirm, as Javier Cercas writes, that "the past is merely a dimension of the present." No Spanish writer has probed the unhealed wounds of the country's history with more subtlety and rigour than Mr Cercas. In the wake of his prize-winning book, "Soldiers of Salamis" (2001) and "The Anatomy of a Moment" (2009), he returns to the Spanish civil war and its disputed aftermath in another "strange novel-without-fiction", as he calls it, a true story that even the most fanciful yarn-spinner would blush to invent.
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