PositiveShephard ExpressCercas began Lord of All the Dead with hopes to cull history from legend but found that establishing history’s granular facts is no easy task. Documents can be wrong, memories distorted; \'it was as difficult to trap the past as it was to trap water in your hands,\' he writes. The novelist in him wanted to enter into Mena’s life, \'to smell exactly what he’d smelled and feel exactly what he’d felt.\' ... Mena’s motivations for dying on what is seen nowadays (and by many of his contemporaries) as the wrong side of history? Cercas finds evidence that he was lured not by militarist-conservatism of Franco but the idealism of the Falange, the party whose communitarianism and calls to sacrifice were coopted by Franco. He finds evidence for the \'Mena of his last days,\' a young man turned \'taciturn, absorbed, disenchanted, humble, lucid, aged and fed-up-with-war.\' Cercas eventually loses his feeling of moral superiority as he draws a detailed panorama of lives defined by the limited perceptions and ideas of a particular time and place.
