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. Tremlett's journey was also an attempt to make sense of his personal experience of the Spanish. 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 the Spanish go to plastic surgeons, donate their organs, visit brothels or take cocaine more than other Europeans?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5547 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Oldie
'It is written so powerfully and grippingly that it guarantees being read long into the night.'

Irish Times
'[A] superb travelogue.'

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.

Shame about simplifing Spanish history
Very good book to understand modern spain and the reasons it is a divided country. The chapters on the politics of modern Spain are very well explained and overall charactor of modern spanish thinking well described. The only thing I am disapointed with is the way he used his emotions and not his journalistic skills to report on the feelings of independence of Catalunya. Maybe he has gone native and let his pro Catalan feelings over ride objectivity. I am living in Valencia now for 3 years and valencianos don't think it is "pointless" to fight for recognition of their language and history. Nobody as far as i am aware knows who spoke this language first valencianos or catalans, and what right have Catalans to declare ownership of Valencia and of this language. If you are going to make statements like this you should back them up with evidence. A good book if Giles Tremlett had stuck to what he knows best, the politics of the mainstream and the feelings of an "extranjero" living in Spain