Book Beings

As much as I love my New York Football Giants and enjoy NFL Football, I have to concede that this wonderful North  American sport  is not football, it is something else.

Yes, there are punters and kickers in American football, but punts and kicks are secondary to throwing and catching and running the ball, and blocking and tackling your opponent. The vast majority of the players don’t ever touch the ball with their feet. In fact, kicking the ball intentionally if you’re not the team punter or kicker could get your team slapped with a fifteen-yard delay of game or unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.

Football, remarkably enough, is that sport played with a round ball and feet. What we in the USA call soccer is football to everyone else in the world, for obvious reasons.

As kids growing up in Newark, we distinguished between “touch” and “tackle.” We’d play touch on concrete or asphalt, and tackle when we had access to dirt or a patch of grass.

Tackle should be what the Giants play. The New York Tackle Giants of the National Tackle League (NTL). Sure, it would take some getting used to, but it would not be a bad thing for us as a nation to admit that maybe others outside our borders have got at least this one thing right.

Football is football, tackle is tackle, and soccer is? Well, surely some enterprising person could find a profitable use for the word.

The just completed 2010 FIFA World Cup tournament, grandly hosted by South Africa, has deepened my understanding and appreciation of the sport that sends nations and continents into extended periods of despair, resignation, or euphoria every four years.

Unfortunately, for the land of my birth, USA, the end came too soon. The Americans just couldn’t seem to focus hard enough in the initial stages of games and extra time to keep their opponents from scoring quickly and consistently forcing the Americans to wage the exhausting battle of playing from behind. Ghana scored in the third minute of extra time in their Round of 16 showdown, a blow from which the USA could not recover.

Happily, however, my ancestral home, Spain, recovered from a shocking opening match loss to Switzerland,  allowing just one goal from that point forward, in what amounted to six consecutive knock-out matches. The Spaniards asserted themselves as the world’s best football nation with their extra time 1-0 win over the Netherlands in the final.

For Spaniards, this first World Cup championship (only the eighth nation to win a World Cup), has at least for a time softened the harsh moment the country is experiencing with unemployment near 20% and a crippled economy. The historic accomplishment of the national team has permeated to all the corners of Spain and into the hearts of Spaniards of all the various regions of the country.

More than one will be delighted that divisive Catalán and Basque nationalist voices have been drowned out by the cries of deliriously happy and proud Spaniards in the streets of Barcelona, Bilbao, and every other city, town, and village in Spain.

Roberto Martínez, a Spaniard and Catalán (currently manager of the English Premier League team, Wigan Athletic) did a fantastic job as guest commentator for ESPN’s television coverage of all the World Cup matches. Martínez suggested the historic triumph of La Roja (“The Red,” the nickname of Spain’s national football team), would have enormous repercussions, not just for Spanish football, but for Spanish politics as well.

The model comportment and camaraderie of the Spanish players (who come from all the corners of Spain), and the dignified leadership of their coach, Vicente del Bosque, illustrated for an entire nation that unity and selflessness can accomplish great things. For the second consecutive World Cup, La Roja was awarded the FIFA Fair Play award for its noteworthy sportsmanship and humility.

We can only hope Spaniards throughout Spain will find in their national team, and not in agenda-driven politicians, a model to follow.

BIG name for a book: The Return. Victoria Hislop’s second novel, following her popular debut, The Island.

Books titled The Return share with The Iliad, Divine Comedy, and War and Peace a BIG thematic title that promises a BIG delivery. Such works are must-reads for any serious Book Being.

Victoria Hislop was thinking BIG. Give her credit for that, but you also have to wonder what she was thinking…

I do try to avoid clumsy books, but I couldn’t help myself. The Return takes place mainly in Granada during that notorious prelude to World War II, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Very hard for me to pass by a book that addresses that pivotal conflict without picking it up and bringing it home with me.

The tragic story of the Ramirez family unfolds during those terrible years. There are some believable stretches (the descriptions of thousands of exhausted, starving refugees fleeing from city to city from Franco’s Nationalist forces and allied German bomber planes are particularly effective), but the characters seem more like caricatures, are never fully convincing, and are prone to speaking in cliches.

I should care about them, I want to, but I remain lukewarm, seeing too much Victoria Hislop in them and not enough Mercedes or Concha or Antonio or Pablo.

The story of the Ramirez family is sandwiched between the current day meetings between  an old Spaniard, Miguel, a café owner who somehow has come to master English like an Oxford don, and a married, youngish, middle-aged Englishwoman, Sonia, who came to Granada with Maggie (her single-but-on-the-prowl-for-a-Spanish-husband girlfriend), presumably to get away from the overbearing English husband for a few days.

It happens that Sonia’s mother was a Spaniard who died some years ago in England. Sonia’s almost complete lack of knowledge about her mother and her mother’s past and family are nearly as disturbing as her kindly English father’s utter cluelessness about his late wife’s past and family history. (You would think the woman had wandered into their lives for a couple of weeks solely to dust and change the bedding.)

The revelations that gradually emerge during Miguel’s account of the Ramirez family during  the war and the role his little café plays in bridging the gap between past and present are predictably implausible.

Still, the novel might have survived these flaws and given the reader something to chew on but for Hislop’s inability to refrain from interjecting her opinions and biases at nearly every turn. So that during the bullfight de rigueur scene, we get this: “The cruelty of the crowd was palpable. They did not want the bull to die too soon…” Is this Miguel’s opinion? Not likely, but it is included as part of his account.

In Hislop’s world, Bullfighting = Cruelty = Nationalists, whereas Flamenco = Truth = Republicans. If she was trying to make the point that the insular-minded Nationalists represented the old Spain and its progress-hindering old traditions, flipping flamenco over to the progressive, outward-looking Republicans (which included among their ranks Soviet-trained Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists) makes little if any sense.

Clearly, dance is dear to Hislop. She sprinkles in a few intense salsa (salsa? really?) and flamenco sessions for the gals from Britain to help them let loose and break a sweat in hot, romantic Granada. But this is about more than just having a good time, as Hislop offers an ongoing meditation on the liberating effects of dance, and in particular, of flamenco, which  speaks to the deepest part of us.

Which is? The deepest part, I mean… What exactly is the deepest part of us?

In Hislop’s world, flamenco is completely divorced from God and religion, despite the Spanish gypsy’s inescapable immersion in the imagery and spirituality of the crucified Christ and la Dolorosa, the suffering Madonna, the Virgin Mary. So we are to believe that flamenco is shunned by traditionalist Spaniards but embraced by atheistic Marxists?

Interesting take.

Examples of Author Interference abound in this novel. One more. When a Republican prisoner is at death’s doorstep, Miguel/Hislop offers this insight, “The priest that sometimes exploited such men for a last minute conversion did not bother to visit.”

What clever phrasing. If the priest visits, he is exploiting. If he doesn’t bother to visit, he is being inhumane. A “heads” I win, “tails” you lose scenario for the author.

This bias is extended to the entire Catholic Church, which, it would appear, exists only to punish innocent people and ensure they never find happiness. Consider that even the Spanish refugee children who are spirited away to England and are routinely welcomed by the curious but gentle English populace, are shunned by those nasty, embittered English Catholic nuns who provide these little rogues shelter and sustenance.

Clumsiness in writing can sometimes be overlooked and forgiven. Bias and the suppression of truth cannot. Being the grandson of two Spanish Republican grandfathers, one murdered, one exiled, gives me a bit different perspective on the matter.

Yes, it is widely known the Catholic Church officially sided with Franco’s Nationalists, and it is widely known that some priests were quite active in the war against the Second Republic and the men and women who fought to defend it.

But Hislop sees the conflict as I did when I was a teen: all the Nationalists and their supporters were evil, and all the Republicans and their supporters were good.

How arrogant and self-righteous I was! Maintaining such a position, of course, placed me beyond reproach, at least in my own little mind. I could blame it on youth and ignorance. Or I could confess to having had an over-inflated sense of Self that left me no room for objectivity.

I once heard an American military expert on the radio talking about the good guys (i.e., us) and the bad guys (i.e., them), in reference to Operation Shock and Awe, and I recognized my own arrogance and felt myself cringe.

The reality, of course, is that good people with noble intentions don’t always agree and may even wage war against each other. By the same token, bad people with the worst of intentions can also disagree and kill each other. And too often the vast majority of disinterested and innocent people get caught in the middle and end up being pushed to one side or the other without fully understanding what is at stake other than personal survival.

To her credit, Hislop does not deny that atrocities were committed by both sides, but her attacks against the Nationalists and the Church are presented as undeniable fact whereas the burning of churches, the raping and murdering of nuns, and the executions of priests by Republicans, some of which was already happening before Francisco Franco’s uprising, are only mentioned in passing and have the odor of rumor rather than fact.

In her concluding note Hislop cites the decision by the Spanish Government in January 2009 to grant the right to apply for Spanish citizenship to the children and grandchildren of those who went into exile after the fall of the Second Republic. This marks the closure of what had been known for decades as the pacto de olvido, which was an unofficial national silence about what had happened during the 3-year civil war.

My two grandfathers are buried in Spain. When I go to Spain I visit the grave of the one who returned from exile in the United States during the amnesty of the early sixties. The one who was murdered was left in a mass, unmarked grave somewhere.

What right have I to point the finger or to condemn? What right has Victoria Hislop?

If the Catholic Church has too often failed its people and its God, it has also, for 2000 years and counting, preserved and proclaimed the teachings of Christ during the world’s darkest hours.

How else would you or I know, for instance, that Jesus invited those who are without sin to cast the first stone?