El General se confiesa

Francisco Franco is hunting in a place in the Cantabrian mountains. We are in 1964, when the 25 years of peace, in the fullness of the dictator. In the mountains he reflects on his life and his wars, on politics and history, trying to justify himself. Pablo Boeza, a young man who marches from his small town to Madrid, with the intention of studying and carving out a future for himself, joins an anarchist group, but fails in his first action and is imprisoned. A boy, the son of Pablo Boeza, meets his mother in the town of his grandparents, near the place of the hunt, and is not afraid to approach the dictator. The appearance of a lyrical Franco, so to speak, is very novel. But it is not a full invention of the author of the novel. No, that general had his weaknesses, it was an easy tear that he combined with the most ruthless cruelty. That huge fold is reflected in the book. Also, very especially, his difficult relationship with his father, his intense love for his mother, essential aspects of Franco's biography, as the best scholars of him well know. Franco speaks mostly in monologues; monologues that fit very well with the deepest truth of the protagonist. Some chapters are these monologues and others are narration of the events. The novel progresses alternating one and the other. Most of the chapters are short or very short, following a formal model of a novel much loved by the author and very common in Italian literature: Italo Calvino, Tabucchi, Baricco, etc.