The world we see burning
Tertulia, vol. 64
Hola. This is Barbara, your guide to the latest cultural news from the Spanish-speaking world. This week, I would like to review an excellent book I read during my summer vacation in Northern Spain. It’s El mundo que vimos arder (2023, The world we saw burn) by Renato Cisneros.
The plot
The story follows an experienced journalist who returns to Spain from an extended stay in his home country Peru. In Lima, he had sought to recover following his separation from his wife. On the taxi ride from the airport to his flat back in Madrid he gets stuck in a traffic jam so that he and the taxi driver have the time and opportunity to engage in a long conversation that mostly evolves around the violent experiences of both the taxi driver and the journalist with terrorism in Peru. This thread also includes some anecdotal digressions of how violence affects human life. The narrative intertwines this present with events from several decades earlier, focusing on the Peruvian character MatÃas Guirato Roeder. MatÃas emigrates to the United States as a young man intending to reunite with his German family (his mother is from Hamburg). Instead, MatÃas joins the US Forces as a pilot and eventually takes part in the massive bombardments of Hamburg during World War II leading to the deaths of thousands of civilians, among them his own maternal family. Only at the end does the narrative transition between the two plots - one of the past and one of the present - become apparent.
The author
Renato Cisneros, born in 1976 in Lima, Peru, is a renowned journalist, broadcaster, and writer. Cisneros has published several books, including poetry collections and novels such as La distancia que nos separa (2015, translated into English as The Distance Between Us, which received significant international acclaim and awards. He currently resides in Madrid.
Last November, Cisneros talked with Antonio Lucas about his latest book at the Casa de América in Madrid:
The experience of migration
The experience of migration is an experience the author shares with all characters in his book. By and by, all of them become uprooted, an effect Cisneros calls «desterritorialización», in the sense of losing the possibilities of claiming space and its corresponding cultural frames (definition following the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition), 2020). The narrator leaves Peru to find security and safety in Madrid. There he meets his future wife Erika who is half German and half Argentinian. Despite a clear German accent she feels at ease in the Spanish language. However, she decides to return to Germany after the separation. The taxi driver and his wife leave Peru because they, too, have had to fear for their security. They also leave because they want to save their marriage. MatÃas, the protagonist of the second narrative thread, is the child of an Italian immigrant and a German mother in Northern Peru. He rejects his violent father and, therefore, wishes to return to his maternal family in Germany, the country that turns out to be the root of the ugliest human violence the last century has seen. Changing his name to Matthew does not mean that he can leave his family traits behind. All characters are in search of their own identity and are sometimes confronted with their uncomfortable past and that of their families.
The cruelty of war
War is depicted in a drastic and impactful way. The physical effect of war on civilians is described in brutal detail affecting all your senses. By doing so, atrocities are becoming normalized as if war were a normal means of dealing with conflict. Besides, the novel explores the psychological toll of war on individuals. In the case of Matias and his comrades, the experience of war leads to emotional numbing, where one becomes cynical and desensitized until he may succumb to thorough psychological suffering. Due to the brutal traumas he suffered in war, he turns into «un latente peligro social» (p. 255, a latent social threat).
Miguel, a regular guest at the bar next to the narrator’s flat, is another character who suffers from his own traumata respectively the agony his father had to endure during the Spanish Civil War. He worked as a firefighter and tried to save as many lives as possible from the bombarded buildings in Madrid. Again, war is seen as a destructive force that affects individuals and society on many levels.
Shortly before his death, practising the questions that are required knowledge for obtaining Spanish nationality with the unnamed narrator, Miguel complains that there are no questions about the Spanish Civil War in the questionnaire. He can’t understand how this can happen:
¡Cómo puede alguien ser español si no sabe lo que pasó en España! (p. 196)
How can one be Spanish without knowing what happened in Spain? Miguel’s final message can be read as a key message of the novel: historical memory is important to never let this obscene horror of war happen again.
My connection to the novel
The novel brought tears to my eyes. During the course of reading, the emotions intensified. The terrorist attacks on a mall in Lima, the bombings of Madrid and Hamburg, two savage femicides, MatÃas’s psychological reaction to war, the sufferings and deaths of his comrades, and the despair of a broken soul leading to repeated violence are portrayed in a raw and stunning manner. It felt almost as if I could smell the explosions and burning bodies, experiencing not only the physical devastation but also the psychological toll war has on us.
However, I believe that the timing of my reading intensified my reaction. I read the novel while travelling in the Basque Country, where our stay included a visit to Gernika, a small town that German pilots barbarically bombarded in 1937. Gernika was chosen as a target by Franco because it was, and remains, the historical and symbolic heart of the Basque Country. As a representation of Basque resistance, it was deliberately selected, and the bombardment primarily targeted civilians. Thanks to Picasso’s monumental painting, Gernika still stands as a symbol of the atrocities of war today.
When will we ever learn? Looking at what is happening in today’s world, I fear we will never learn to care for ourselves as a species and respect the planet that sustains us. As Renato Cisneros says in an interview, «nunca aprendimos las lecciones de la guerra» (we never learned the lessons of war). Is violence a hereditary trait, a kind of killer instinct, we cannot escape from? Cisneros calls it «instinto asesino» in his talk at Casa de América. I hope it isn’t.
The novel is well worth a read. Perhaps don’t do it before going to bed because it might cause nightmares. As is what happens when you watch the current news.
This is all for today. I’ll keep you posted about my readings. Let me know which novels you have been reading this summer.