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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > Blind Sunflowers

Blind Sunflowers

This novel captures the everyday suffering of civilians in Franco’s Spain.

A captain in Franco’s army renounces winning the war on the very day of victory; a young poet flees with his pregnant girlfriend; a prisoner refuses to live a lie so that his executioner can be held accountable; a lustful deacon hides his desires behind apostolic fascism. Four subtly connected tales, narrated with the individual styles of different voices but in the same spirit. These are stories from silent times, when people feared that others might discover what they knew. Whatever their affiliation, nobody survives unscathed.

Author

Alberto Méndez

Alberto Méndez

Books

Blind Sunflowers

Alberto Méndez was born in 1941 in Madrid. He studied in Rome and graduated in Literature and Philosophy from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He always worked in national and international publishing companies. His book Los Girasoles Ciegos was published in 2004. Alberto Méndez was awarded the Setenil Prize for the title (a prize for the best short-story book published in Spain), The Critic’s Prize, which for the first time was awarded to a posthumous book in 2005 (the author died in 2004), and the National Prize for Literature.

Translator

Nick Caistor

Nick Caistor

Books

Blind Sunflowers

The Sorrows of Mexico

The Proof

Nick Caistor has translated more than thirty books by Spanish and Latin American authors. As Latin American editor of the magazine Index on Censorship, he edited the English version of Argentina’s report on the thousands of disappeared, NUNCA MAS, and has translated and written about many human rights problems in Latin America.

From Spain, he has translated novels by Juan Marse and Eduardo Mendoza which examine the effects of the Civil War; in 2007 he won the Valle-Inclan translation prize for his translation of The Sleeping Voice, a novel based on the experiences of Republican women prisoners in the Franco period.

Published by

Arcadia Books, 2008
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This novel captures the everyday suffering of civilians in Franco’s Spain.

A captain in Franco’s army renounces winning the war on the very day of victory; a young poet flees with his pregnant girlfriend; a prisoner refuses to live a lie so that his executioner can be held accountable; a lustful deacon hides his desires behind apostolic fascism. Four subtly connected tales, narrated with the individual styles of different voices but in the same spirit. These are stories from silent times, when people feared that others might discover what they knew. Whatever their affiliation, nobody survives unscathed.

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