The strange challenge involved in reading Cerces's novel Soldiers of Salamis

The central event in Javier Cerces's 2001 novel, Sodiers of Salamis, is the escape of Sanchez Mazas from a firing squad as he faced death near the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939). SM ran into the forest amid the chaos of the mass shooting; as the soldiers later searched for escapees, one came directly upon SM. Their eyes met. A voice called out: Anyone over there? The soldier looked at SM and said: No. Then left the scene. A heroic moment, or so it seems. But in fact SM after the war became a leading propagandist for the brutal Franco dictatorship, and thereby responsible in part for thousands of deaths and detentions. In the final third of the novel, the narrator - Cerces himself - encouraged by his girlfriend (and fortune teller on a local TV station!) and by the writer Roberto Bolano tries to track down the soldier who let SM escape; he finds a likely candidate in an elderly war veteran, Millares, living in a retirement home in Dijon; in the finest passages of the novel, Cerces visits Millares, a crusty old guy, and over the course of a day of conversation they develop a mutual respect and rapport. The actual role M may have played in the firing-squad episode is left ambiguous, as is his moral culpability for allowing a fascist to escape unpunished. This novel seems to be closely based on facts and on the author's actual historical research - though it doesn't pretend to be anything but fiction. In the style of many works from the 60s till the end of the century, this novel also continually reflects on the nature of literary composition itself: We get accounts not only of the "true events' of the story but of the author's struggle in writing and completing the work we're reading - a hall-of-mirrors effect. Some of the material may be baffling for English-language readers, and it's an uncomfortable read throughout in that it's impossible to empathize with a protagonist who was one of the most powerful men in a brutal, fascist government - but in a way that's what gives the novel its tension: It would have been easy to write a romance about the narrow escape of a hero. This novel tests the limits of our capacity for empathy.