Books Briefly Noted: A Fictional Homage to the IB
The Colour of Poppies, by Lola Alemany. Translated by David Roe. Editorial Cuadranta, 2023. 260pp.
The main reason for creating this Briefly Noted section two years ago remains true today: we receive books in such great numbers that we cannot always find a reviewer for each. One genre that continues to arrive in a steady stream is the testimonial, biography, or fictional portrayal of International Brigaders, including Lincoln volunteers, written by their children and grandchildren. These works share an impulse to tell a personal story, summarize a life and, not surprisingly, to keep alive the political commitments of a loved one considered to represent a whole generation.
The Colour of Poppies, the translation of Lola Alemany’s De color de amapola (2022), seeks to honor the memory of the Brigades through an interwoven story of women volunteers fighting and working in Albacete, the IB headquarters, and a contemporary female character trying to unearth the bones of her grandfather from a mass grave in Albacete, all the while redefining her own relation to politics, society, and her family.
Each character in the wartime context, too, struggles to balance the personal and the political within the gendered role imposed on them, and to honor various social and ideological commitments during the many upheavals of the war. Meanwhile, the protagonist’s efforts to exhume her loved one in twenty-first-century Spain force her to negotiate with lawyers, the Spanish state, and local authorities, as she bonds with strangers whose relatives lie buried in the same mass grave.
Based as it is on archival research, outlined in an epilogue that also reveals the author’s personal connections to the past, Alemany’s novel should have a wide appeal.
