'Soldiers of Salamis' by Javier Cercas

Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury Publishing; 224 pages; 2004. (Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean.)

Soldiers of Salamis is one of those strange novels which blurs fact and fiction, so that the reader is never quite sure what is true and what is not. Such confusion is compounded by the author placing himself in the story as one of the major characters.

The book revolves around an incident that occurred in 1939 during the Spanish Civil War in which a prominent writer and fascist, Rafael Sanchez Mazas, escaped execution by firing squad. While on the run in the forest, Sanchez Mazas stumbles upon a soldier, who should have killed him but decides to turn and walk away instead. Who was this soldier and why did he make this decision?

Some 60 years later, these questions -- and the botched execution -- haunt a Spanish journalist, Javier Cercas, who decides to find out what really happened.

The first part of Soldiers of Salamis tells of Cercas's investigation of the event; the second is the resultant biography of Rafael Sanchez Mazas based on the anecdotal evidence he has acquired; and the third is the journalist's quest to track down the soldier, so that he can ask him why he chose to spare Sanchez Mazas' life that fateful day.