This book was written in Galician but I read its Spanish translation. Now, Spanish is my third language, so God knows how much was lost in this game of Chinese whispers but I will try to tell you what I gathered from it in English, my second language.
Sometimes I couldn’t make any sense of it – it might be because of the aforementioned Chinese whispers or it might because it’s one of those intentionally confusing books with a very convoluted narrative.

The tagline for this book is: Can a pencil change the course of history?Which you will have to admit is one of the stupidest taglines you’ve ever read.

It of course focuses on the Spanish Civil War because the Spanish will not soon tire of writing about it now that they started. It’s all a patchwork of memories as recalled by different characters (often antagonists). It’s up to the reader to piece it all together but the pay-off isn’t all that. I think. I don’t remember. I read this book ages ago. Now it’s just a patchwork of impressions of a novel that wasn’t linear to begin with. Understand me here. I can tell you there was a love story, as there is always love story in books about war.

It’s apparently one of the best books in Galician and I don’t want to sound like an asshole but I can’t imagine there was much of a competition. But then, hey, other people think it was : “hugely moving, seductively readable, absolute triumph”, so you know, see for yourself.

You know what’s really interesting, though? This novel is extremely popular in Arab countries. Almost all GR reviews seem to be in Arabic. It seems like one of those ‘Big in Japan’ kind of phenomena.