The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War

A few weeks back I posted about Archipelago Books, a wonderful independent press specializing in foreign literature in translation.  I just finished one of their recent releases, Serge Pey, The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War.  I started it initially out of sheer laziness: it isn't very long, and the stories are mostly quite short, few of them longer than ten pages.  This is always appealing, because even when you're busy, you feel as though you can make some progress.

The first few stories were a little odd, but then the book grew on me.  About halfway through, I decided I liked it.  Well, "liked" isn't exactly the right word, because a few of the stories, which describe the experiences of refugees from the Spanish Civil War as seen through the eyes of a boy, are rough.  In particular, "The Piece of Wood" is a disturbing reminder of the inexplicably awful things that some humans will do to others.

But the stories are well told, and some of them are delightful.  Two of them describe a pair of aged friends so passionately devoted to their chess matches that even while in prison they devise a system of Morse code allowing them to play games from different floors of the building by tapping out messages on the water pipes.  Later, out of prison, one of them suddenly begins losing all of his chess matches, but we learn that this is because he is so fervently committed to the purity of the game as game--not to the goal of winning, but to a beautiful match--that he now plays in such a way as to create beautiful images and patterns from the pieces as they are moved around the board.  In another story we learn of a man who has an immense library in his home, but all of whose books stand backwards on the shelves, with the spines facing in and the white pages facing out.  He knows his way around the entire library by sight and by position, creating poems from various combinations of the books' hidden titles.

I know very little about the Spanish Civil War.  Americans, I suspect, think of Nazism and Soviet communism when we think about the convulsions of 20th-century Europe.  But this slender volume suggests that the Spanish Civil War was also a human tragedy.