Books in the midst of war Foreword by Harry Owens
García-Ortega Paco Almena
The chance or the whims of some literature have elf today I wanted to find before you and have had the pleasure of meeting Augustine, author of this war must have that after the first few months of public life, present here today.
The novel fell into my hands a little more than a year, a member of the reading committee Felipe Trigo award, which makes the group of four people who read at the time, we if not the first, they were among the first to read it. Tremendous responsibility, will lead you, himself a judge of literary excellence. Tremendous and painful point, if we consider that, despite the varying quality of the work, all pose a minor miracle, the miracle of a person who has dedicated work, time and life to illuminate a text, warping in words a story that has left some of his life and that you will understand, is not something that can judge: the writer puts his life in the story and that is not measurable, is and should be. Safely, without fear, without courage, no literature.
must have War has everything that has courage, has much, and this is a simple intuition of a reader-writer who has put his life in the effort, he has observed and has lived and has embarked on a war with weapons of defeat, which are the dignity. must have War is a classic, a novel learning and memory novel, demanding and passionate, committed to the struggle of a time that seems orphan struggles and yet reflected in the struggles of the past. Rebecca, the young narrator, anti-globalization activist takes us through the recent struggles and demands of what is called the people of Seattle. A civil society that rose bare arms against the system, and is heard from then outside the walls of the meetings of the G8 or the IMF, which had its major milestone in the mobilization against the war in Iraq. In their struggle, and in their pursuit of Hungarian photographer Turai, the narrator meets with John Donaldson, a hard old man who knew the exile of the English in the fields of southern France after the civil war and whose story serves to complete the circle Rebeca open, spinning and both halves of the novel narrative. How
spin these two times is the motor of the novel. To do this, I remember how interested a few years ago, between the global cry against the invasion of Iraq, Raúl del Pozo described how one of the forms of protest by demonstrators was to sound sirens while bombing ground cast body and wrote that the people of Madrid had a genetic memory of the bombing. Facts and joined with the past. What the reporter was saying was that the desire of the demonstrators this afternoon in Madrid going by memory, a memory "genetic" war of 36, and the hope that the horror is not repeated elsewhere. That is, in essence, the initial approach Augustine's novel: the opposition or, rather, the complementarity of two times that are two fights, two characters on one hand, the narrator, committed to the misnamed anti-globalization and the other, the old fighter of wars lost, leading to Rebecca for the margins of a story that is also yours, not in an abstract sense, even epic, but visceral, purely emotional and that sort of genetic memory of the journalist speaking from Madrid.
There is much history in this novel, but mostly there's a lot memory, and it is in the realm of memory where it moves the whole rigmarole of the English exiles who arrived in France still free in 1939 and suffered the harshness of refugee camps. And it moves in the field of memory that is almost that of evocation, because the fact is on what I have previously called the margins of history, and here I am referring to the story official of
obvious fact that, as the seizure of the English Republicans in France free, are a shameful stain on the history of a people who distinguished himself in the following years by a stubborn resistance struggle was the same in which prisoners risked their lives to Gurs, Argelès Sur Mer and other areas that most deserve to be called concentration. That is the terrain of the novel, and in this field the author moves quickly into the symbolic, unravel and transcending. Integrating it into the overall interpretation of the story to give it a sense of communication and strong political commitment.
When I do command in the sense that, as Umberto Eco claimed, "Never as today itself is imbued with political news, motivated by the symbolic abundantly nourished. Understanding the symbolic mechanisms through which we move means politics. Do not understand practice leads to bad policy "( illusion strategy , 1996). Naturally, Eco himself admits no simple reduction from the political to the symbolic, but sees it as another dimension. In this sense in which there must War is a political novel. Through the symbolic setting out a political thought, in part, is forged images, in a kind of narrative paintings, and it does a very literary and while very plastic. The importance acquired by the photo in the story perfectly sums up the intent of a novel that, like photography, although this could be said of all art-work with archetypes, or rather, with archetypal perceptions that have been forged in the collective memory as an image and therefore a symbol. The image becomes central to the unraveling of the novel, the image as a creator of memory over modernity, in fact the most powerful creative valid symbols for the interpretation of reality.
The linearity of Rebecca's story is broken by the encounter with Donaire, that's where the novel gives its best, where the pictures will reveal archetypes as symbolic elements able to unravel the realities and generate a speech of enormous complexity, far from the purely theoretical thought, and ultimately banal, dominant today. Augustine, like other writers of his generation does not avoid what could be called direct action in literature, advocates and has a literature of complaint, not a complaint nostalgic and sentimental, but its time, this time we have had and struggles also pending. For this, the author goes to the struggles of the past and who look in a mirror and gives narrative complexity to a story that branches on one side to the field of memory and the other towards the creation of a complex thought and consistent with the reality of a new world, so in both directions novel feeds and offers flexible interpretation keys and interchangeable between the two narrative time. These keys which represent a certain continuity, a illation between two times and two very different circumstances and with very different motivations. Two times, in short, unrepeatable in themselves, perhaps even unique, whose relationship goes beyond the mere cause and effect, and displayed yarn in the story as one of mutual illustration another in a permissible reading precisely because the degree of evocation here is the past, not a story-teller, that's another story, but no systematic narrative, oral and fluctuating, but certainly full of a truth so powerful as that would testable in current events.
Finally, a warning, in this novel are going to find complex and literary discourse that is perhaps his greatest achievement, the great achievement in short of the best literature and art with a capital, which is nothing to propose structures and speeches to encourage the creation of new modes, no new topics, such as Borges said that they were more than four or five in all literature. What makes this book great is its simple prose and his speech voluntarily voluntarily also fragmented, often visual work and a temporality of the story in fragments that overlap past and present and builds, in turn, an ideological foundation reasoning that in the depth of the story is systematic guess and based on very solid moral principles, the superficiality of certain literature seemed unjustly banished forever. Like other writers of this generation around thirty, Augustine gives a knock on the reader's consciousness, commitment cries out that the worst post-modernity, the most conservative, had wanted to artfully remove of the writer's life is but vital commitment to the limit with their literature and their lives put into play at every step.
Villanueva de la Serena, December 2008.
-Turai 
