Stories with portentous momentum that carries them and their characters to sometimes startlingly inevitable endings. In what was her first publication, Keegan brings out the pain and longing, the understandable and questionable acts of human relationship in mature and unflinching exposure.

The writing is true and bright as ice. You can tell that she has edited like a butcher paring away the fat to leave the words clean cut and lean. The paragraph should “go into, not on about the subject,” she said once, the comment of one who knows her craft.
 
As a matter of course, a set of stories is often tied to a certain place and culture. What I found worked very well in these is, as we switch from rural Ireland to the American South—Keegan writes authoritatively on both—the stories refresh each other with alternating voices and expectations.

You know how Elmore Leonard said: “I try to leave out the parts people skip”? Best writing advice I ever heard. Well, Barry Hannah is a master of it.  He can make Carver sound wordy. Hannah gives you the poetic American South in all its heart-wrenching brutality.  Of these twenty, some are real short. Stories that last as long as a song, strength and beauty packed into a box the characters cannot fight a way out of. Rich in imagination and turn of phrase, almost sexually intense, he is not trying to be smart, but is so anyway. Just superb.

When it comes to American short stories, I found Richard Ford’s last collection, Sorry For Your Trouble, well-crafted but predictable, stale even, the same tropes revisited. No new light comes to pierce his dim view on life. But he can certainly spot and pick some good’uns by other writers, and although there’s a tendency to be period pieces about family and place, the standard in this selection is high.
 
I particularly liked C.S Godshalk’s The Wizard and there were two that made me sit up and really take notice—you know, that lift you get when something really interesting is going on in the writing: Car-Crash While Hitchhiking by Denis Johnson and How to Talk to a Hunter by Pam Houston.

More short stories.
 
Disturbing, moving, stylish in a good, old-fashioned way. A book for the winter fireside.

I got so excited about the first story that I thought I’d struck genius. I found the other stories fabulously inventive, original and just a whole bunch of fun and dream logic let loose—Secret Identity and The Lesson are outstanding—but it was “The Summer People” that really got me. It’s the way the sassy but abandoned and put-upon girl protagonist presents the outlandish circumstance as if it’s tiresome (she has, in fact, had enough of it) that works so brilliantly well.
 
Kelly Link does this thing where she slips something utterly weird into the narrative while you’re not watching and makes out it’s perfectly normal. I adore this trick. She can also be very amusing and for that I, for one, am thankful. Misery is present in most people’s existence and serious fiction must deal with this reality, but it need not acquiesce in it and there has, also, to be an antidote.
 
Superheroes, a recurring theme, are presented as working people with a difficult job to do. “Sometimes you’ll be fighting somebody, this real asshole, and you’ll be both be getting winded, and then you start noticing his outfit and he’s looking, too, and then you’re both wondering if you got your outfits at this same place.”
 
And how about: “Werewolf Boyfriends go on and on about the environment, and also are always trying to get you to go running with them.”
 
And there are the mermaids, “an invasive species, like the iguanas. [….] they didn’t speak, only sang and whistled and made rude gestures”.

Decades of suppression during Franco’s regime, of distrust and reticence after it, have meant that the history of the Spanish Civil War has often been chronicled and made known by writers from outside of Spain.
 
This book, by British author and journalist David Baird, who has lived in Andalucia since the 1970s, unearths postwar stories that would otherwise have remained buried, like many victims of the dictatorship in their unmarked graves.
 
Baird’s account centres on Frigiliana village in the province of Málaga, where he has lived since the 1970s, and specifically about the vigorous guerilla movement that operated in the mountains above the village after the war ended in 1939. Led by a disciplined character known as Roberto, the men of the maquis, opposed to or simply persecuted by Franco’s state, survived in the sierra as an insurgent band until the last of them was killed in 1952.
 
While supported by archive material such as Guardia Civil reports, Town Hall and parish records, the book is based firmly on the testimonies of ageing citizens of Frigiliana, including guerrilleros themselves, whose stories might otherwise have gone to the grave with them.
 
These locals, who might have been reluctant to open up to a Spanish researcher, entrusted Baird with their personal histories of the 1940s. Beatings by the Guardia Civil, threats and abject poverty drove desperate men up into the sierra, adding new recruits, often illiterate and apolitical, to Roberto’s nominally Communist brigade.
 
They would ultimately be abandoned and betrayed by the Communist leadership in Spain, who on Stalin’s instruction gave up on the ragtag armed struggle, without bothering to tell “the people of the sierra”, let alone attempt to extract and rescue them.
 
The hardship and hunger of those years is hard to reconcile with the Frigiliana of today, which has made a mint from tourism and foreigners buying up village property. The Costa del Sol speculators moved inland to gobble it all up. The unseemly, money-driven invasion has reached saturation point and the local character of the village is virtually eradicated. They may have prosperity, but peace have they none.
 
Frigiliana’s old residents, David Baird adopted as one of their own, are strangers in their own town, their voices drowned out by English and other European accents. Baird’s book is a light held up to a forgotten generation.

Antony Beevor is a proper historian. I read his book on the Spanish Civil War while researching for my Asturias novel.
 
The Battle for Spain chronicles the pre-conditions, fighting and aftermath of the Civil War with admirable clarity.
 
The main points regarding the conflict are well known. The left went too far in its libertarianism and Catholic conservatism was never going to permit it, legitimately elected government or not. Subsequently, the right was merciless in its repression.
 
Some of the incidents that stayed with me:
 
The complete inability of opposing sides to countenance compromise
Thanks to the progressive reforms of the new Republic, women voted for the first time in the elections in 1933. That many voted of them for the centre-right infuriated the socialists led by Largo Caballero, whose newspaper declared: “Harmony? No! Class War! Hatred of the Criminal Bourgeoisie to the Death!” They urged an insurrection against the government “with all the characteristics of civil war” whose success would depend on violence.
 
Months later, in October 1934, the war did start, to all extents and purposes, with the uprising at Covadonga in Asturias, where it was put down by Franco, who allowed his Moors and legionnaires to loot, rape and execute.
 
The betrayal of the Republican cause by the Communists
who only ever sought the advantage of their Party. This division and treachery, which contributed to the defeat of the legitimate Republican government, is depicted in Orwell’s “A Homage to Catalonia” and also Ken Leach’s film “Tierra y Libertad” [Land and Freedom]. I saw the film with Spanish friends in Madrid when it came out in 1995. It was the first time I have ever been in a cinema where people stood up and applauded afterwards. One of my friends said: “It takes a foreigner, an outsider, to make a film like this.” Sixty years later, he was saying, in a democratic Spain, the war and the dictatorship it led to was still too emotive a subject for the Spanish to come to terms with. The wound was still too deep and angry.
 
As early as 17 July 1935, the Communist Party was denouncing their Anarchist comrades in arms as fascists. On the Left, voices of reason went unheard and the Communists “ruthless rejection of sentimentality” set the stage for the conflict.
 
The zeal for savagery of the Spanish Catholic Church
No sooner does the Right lose the election in 1936 than the Church talks of “a Judaeo-Masonic world conspiracy” and “a war to the finish.” The village committees that condemned Republican sympathizers to execution would regularly include the local priest.
 
The butchery of the Spanish Civil War
“There was practically no village in La Rioja which did not have inhabitants buried in the mass grave of La Barranca.”
In Córdoba, 10,000 were killed: a tenth of the population.
 
Guernica
Beevor’s account of the German bombing is particularly chilling. Franco’s GHQ, of course, attributed the obliteration to the “the Reds” burning the town down. Misinformation is nothing new.
 
The interminable mercilessness of the Nationalists
There were terrible acts on both sides. But if the “Red Terror” was a spasm that gave way after an initial slaughter, notoriously of priests, the “White Terror” was an ideological cleansing of all who thought differently, insisted on by Franco and enforced long after the war had been won. Franco, who strikes me always as a hideously mediocre personality, did not believe in reconciliation. If Stalin and Beria had their Gulag in the USSR, Franco’s obsession with suppression was equal to theirs, and he put as many opponents into his prison camps as he could find. Those who were not like him were a gangrene in the body politic to be cut out, a sickness to be eradicated utterly. The Bishop of Vic called for “a scalpel to drain the pus from Spain’s entrails.”
 
The señoritos
After the war, the “cleaning up” of defenceless opponents by Falangists was also carried out by young, educated gentlemen from respectable families. “The young señoritos, often aided by the sisters and girlfriends, organized themselves into mobile squads, using their parents’ touring cars.” These types are still prevalent in Spanish society today. We call them pijos.
 
Franco
I am always struck by Franco’s mediocrity as a person.
 
The betrayal by the democratic West
The post-war abandonment of the legitimate Republican government by France and the UK was predictably shameful. Pétain praised Franco as “the cleanest sword in the western world” and was appointed French ambassador to Spain. The British Navy failed to evacuate refugees by ship and Prime Minister Chamberlain misled the Commons on Franco’s intentions concerning reprisals.
 
In 1945, Spanish Republican exiles fighting for the Allies would be among the first to enter and liberate Paris. In Spain, the resistance movement keeping up the fight against Franco, naively hoped and believed that the Allies would now proceed to march south to free them from their own fascist dictatorship. We, of course, let them down.
 
These Spanish maquis will be the subject of my next post.

When I arrived in Madrid in 1991, this little book was a useful introduction to the world which would become my home. It was a good time and place for a youngish Englishman to try out a new start.
 
I barely had the Spanish to ask for box of matches, but managed perfectly. I found the people that much more open and accommodating than in England. There was an optimism to the city back then. That the so-called “Transition” to democracy after Franco was largely a theatre, and the powers that be broadly unchanged, hadn’t really registered. There was a strong sense of a right to individual freedoms and to anti-establishmentarian protest. I found genuine barrio life, honest young people sin complejos, sexual freedom and joints in bars. Life was cheaper with the peseta, money was coming in from the European Community and there were jobs. If bureaucracy was sluggish and inefficient, the upside was that they didn’t check up on you much or have your number. As a foreigner, I found a welcome. Spain was still in the process of opening to the world and immigration was not a concern. A generalized friendliness was to be found in Madrid.
 
Hooper’s book charted recent political and social change and explained aspects of my new world in a very approachable and well-informed style. The church, the army, education and the media, Catalonia and the Basque Country were all covered, providing a helpful background to my everyday experience.
 
The book, like my snapshot of the early nineties above, is very dated now. Hooper has since written “The New Spaniards” which may well reflect a rapidly changing society. Madrid is another, unhappier city today. If there is no longer the threat of a military coup or the atrocities of ETA, something even grimmer has happened to the place: the death of hope. Like many a modern city, Madrid has fallen prey to a homogenized commercialization. A corrupt, reactionary, money-obsessed mindset rules its local government and on the streets today, I find cynical disillusionment, social fragmentation and fakery.
 
Nothing lasts forever. The gentle phase of confident convivencia that I lived through didn’t. Maybe the monetized misery will pass away, also.

Also in Kyiv, the project visited Lyceum #64, whose amazing students produced stories not only in English but Spanish as well.
 
The English class of older teenagers wrote the eight individual tales you can see in the photos,
 
The 12 to 14-year-olds wrote twenty varied ghost stories under the collective title El Mundo Fantasma. One of the students, Anastasiia Makarets, made the main cover illustration for these.
 
What talented youngsters there are in Ukraine!
 
Heartfelt thanks to the school and its staff for their invitation, warm welcome and their indomitable spirit.

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También en Kyiv, el proyecto visitó el Liceo Nº64, cuyos increíbles estudiantes produjeron historias no sólo en inglés sino también en español.
 
La clase de inglés de adolescentes mayores escribió los ocho cuentos individuales que se ven en las fotos.
 
Los niños de 12 a 14 años escribieron veinte historias variadas de fantasmas bajo el título colectivo El Mundo Fantasma. Una de las estudiantes, Anastasiia Makarets, creyó la ilustración de la portada principal.
 
¡Qué jóvenes tan talentosos hay en Ucrania!
 
El más sincero agradecimiento al colegio y a su personal por su invitación, calurosa acogida su espíritu indomable.

September 24

The project visited Kyiv International School, where the brilliant 8 and 9-year-old Ukrainian students not only wrote their own imaginative stories, but did it in English.
 
The two classes chose as titles: Vini the Penguin and The Tiger & the Witch.
 
Huge thanks for the invitation and support to undaunted school director Rachel Geary, volunteers, the Demchenko family and to Polina Orlichenko for the fabulous illustrations.