Blind Sunflowers

For the first time in Russian — the greatest sensation of Spanish literature of the new century. Alberto Méndez wrote only one book in his lifetime and died in the same year it was published, but “Blind Sunflowers” had the effect of an exploding bomb. The book won numerous awards (including Spain’s top one — the National Prize for Literature), became a bestseller, was translated into many languages (the American story of “Blind Sunflowers” began with its serialization in the prestigious magazine The New Yorker), and served as the basis for the film of the same name, submitted by Spain for the Oscar.
It may seem banal to say that there are no winners in a civil war, yet Méndez tells of a total national defeat, on the level of human nature, on the level of the soul. The book consists of four stories, interwoven with jeweler’s precision, and each is titled “First Defeat,” “Second Defeat,” and so on. And in these absolutely inhuman conditions, when people are killed not for what they did but for what they think, people go on living and even loving. Here a captain of the Francoist army deserts on the eve of victory and surrenders to the Republicans doomed to defeat; here a young poet flees to the mountains with his pregnant beloved; a jailed cellist builds a many-tiered edifice of lies for salvation only to bring it crashing down; and a lustful deacon masks sinful desire with bloodthirsty calls for vengeance…