Product Description

The appearance - sixty years after that war ended - of mass graves containing victims of Franco's death squads has finally broken what Spaniards call 'the pact of forgetting'. At this charged moment, Giles Tremlett embarked on a journey around Spain - and through Spanish history. Spaniards, he found, had tried to wipe both the Civil War and Franco from their memory. The graves were 'secretos a voces' - whispered secrets everyone knew about but did not discuss. History, Tremlett discovered, was a tinder-box of disagreements for Spaniards. Who caused the Civil War? Why do Basque terrorists kill? Why do Catalans hate Madrid? Did the islamist bombers who killed 190 people in 2004 dream of a return to Spain's Moorish past? The ghosts of the past were everywhere. Tremlett's journey was also an attempt to make sense of his personal experience of Spaniards. Why do they dislike authority figures, but are cowed by a doctor's white coat? How had women embraced feminism without men noticing? What binds gypsies, jails and flamenco? Why do Spaniards go to plastic surgeons, donate their organs, visit brothels or take cocaine more than other Europeans? Finding answers to those questions involved travelling some strange and colourful byroads.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53033 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 433 pages

Mail on Sunday
'It would be hard to think of a better introduction to this wonderfully diverse nation. ... There is something for everyone.'

Sunday Telegraph
'Tremlett's lively and well-informed Ghosts of Spain is at once a history, a journalistic inquiry and a travel book.'

BBC History Magazine
'Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Spain.'

Customer Reviews

Clear and Passionate account of Spain past and present
This book is a balance between an accurately researched and passionately personal account of Spain past and present. Having lived in Spain for a short while - I felt it captured precisely the atmosphere of this fascinating and multi-levelled culture which eludes so many of us. Tremlett has obviously met this Herculean task of unveiling a complicated history and multi-facetted culture with great sensitivity and compassion. He covers complicated and sensitive isues such as the Franco era, ETA and Basque culture and history aswell as flamenco and the history of tourism and the Spaniard's relation to all these issues today.
The author's compassion for the Spaniards and their past is offset by the precision of the journalist's eye for the politically explosive and important issues which have come into the public eye recently. He delves deeply with great passion and understanding into a culture he has adopted as his own but to which he will never belong. At times I felt I was reading a scintillating novel and at others I was reading a political account. The author manages to synthesise these beautifully! If you have ever been to Spain, want to go to Spain or are just interested in the country, read this book!
It will deepen your compassion and expand your understanding of a culture that has had so many ties with our own over the years.

A witty mix of the personal and the historical
Tremlett is a witty, trenchant and astute observer of modern Spain. Being an outsider will forever condemn him in the eyes of Spaniards wishing their past would go quietly into the night; and yet it is just his outsider status that allows him to couple the telling quote with the ascerbic-yet-loving anecdote. His chapter on flamenco is an outsider's paean to his adopted country. The chapter on Benidorm combines high-comedy, bathos and despair in equal measure. His writing is at its best when his natural wit and humour come to the fore, traits which lift this book well-above the usual 'foreign correspondent does foreign country' diatribe. Highly recommended.

Modern Spain mostly explained
An indispensable introduction to the complex politics and fast-shifting culture of Spain over the last thirty years, Ghosts of Spain presents an engaging and highly readable account of the country's remarkable transition from stagnant authoritarianism to vigorous democracy. The opening chapters on the partly hidden legacy of the Civil War and Francoism are quite outstanding as Tremlett gives reasons for Spain's extraordinary lack of either reconciliation or recrimination. Recent scandals and the often-related construction and tourist booms are smartly handled and the detour to the heart of flamenco is genuinely moving. The author is much less sure-footed on the chapters on Basque and Catalan nationalism, revealing an unfortunate and disappointingly clichéd Madrid metropolitan bias. Although the book also suffers from what seems to have been hasty editing, the recompense is Tremlett's a fine journalistic sensitivity for place and people and a genuine love for his subject.