Flamenco: Books of The Times. In the Land of Flamenco, Civil War’s Buried Bones

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By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: February 21, 2007

Californians learn not to think about the San Andreas fault. Otherwise, who could summon the nerve to walk out the front door? In Spain, an entire nation has learned how not to address a historical fault line that shifted just 70 years ago, setting one half of the country against the other in a murderous furor that paved the way forflamenca

30 years of military dictatorship. Spain, the 19th-century writer Ángel Ganivet wrote, “is a cage full of madmen all suffering from the same manía: their inability to put up with one another.” The Spanish Civil War and Franco’s regime seemed to confirm the thesis.

Denis Doyle

Giles Tremlett
GHOSTS OF SPAIN
Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past

By Giles Tremlett

Walker & Company. 386 pages. $26.95.
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Today, a little more than 30 years after Franco’s death, Spain might well be the happiest country in Europe, with a robust democracy, a booming economy, dazzling new architectural trophies and a health-care system that can take credit for Europe’s longest-lived citizens. The uneasy secret behind the miraculous shifting of gears known as la Transición (“the Transition”) is an unspoken pact to let the past alone, what one member of Parliament has called “forgetting by everyone for everyone.”

(leer +) [vía new york times]

tags: flamenco