Joan Sales - the first novel to tell the story of the Spanish Civil War from the Catalan side - the loser's side. Against this backdrop of bitter fratricidal war is set a timeless story of three men who love the same woman

Joan Sales, Uncertain Glory, Trans. by Peter Bush. MacLehose Press, 2014. [1956.]




Originally published in Catalan in 1956, albeit in a heavily censored form, Uncertain Glory was the first novel to tell the story of the Spanish Civil War from the losers’ side. Joan Sales fought on the Madrid and Aragon fronts before fleeing into exile. He distilled his experiences of this bitter fratricidal conflict into a timeless story of three men who love the same woman.
Despite his allegiances, Sales avoids a simplistic division into good and evil. The novel’s hero, Juli Soleràs, perhaps the most compelling character in Catalan literature, is more of an anti-hero: half philosopher, half cynic, locked in an eternal struggle with himself.
A thrilling epic that has drawn comparisons with the works of Dostoevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory provides an authentic, homegrown counterpoint to such classics as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.


First published in Spanish in 1956, Uncertain Glory was the first novel to tell the story of the Spanish Civil War from the Catalan side - the loser's side. Against this backdrop of bitter fratricidal war is set a timeless story of three men who love the same woman.
Sales condemns the fascist and anarchists with equal vehemence. In describing the war in its full complexity, he avoids a simplistic division into good and evil. Even the novel's hero, Juli Soleràs, the most compelling character in Catalan literature, is more of an anti-hero: half philosopher, half cynic, locked in an eternal struggle with himself.
Uncertain Glory overflows with life, energy and talent: the reader is plunged into a thrilling epic that has drawn comparisons with the works of Dostoevsky and Stendhal.


‘Wonderfully readable, with the vivid images of the physical world and everyday life that gives substance to fiction interspersed with sharp conversation, scatological philosophical rants and touches of (usually dark) humour, Uncertain Glory is a major novel that expresses the disillusion of a generation who fought a just war against fascism, but lost their idealism and youth’ - Michael Eaude


‘Uncertain Glory stands out as a lone monument among Catalan novels of the postwar period’ - Xavier Pla.


Well this is the first of two book from catalan I’ll be reviewing  you in the next few weeks , this first is considered a classic in Catalan and also one of the definitive works on the Spanish civil war .Joan Sales was born in Barcelona and studied law just before the outbreak of the Civil war , he fought in the civil war and afterwards he lived in Exile .He first published the book in 1956 ,but revised it over the years until the definitive version of the book came out in 1971 , as the earlier version had been subject to Franco censorship of them . 
8 july
We are still doing , nothing , just waiting for the recruits to arrive .We have already alloted officer to the future companies :I’ve got the 4th and my captain will be lieutenant gallart , the ex-waiter .
The village couldn’t be more dismal :It’s boxed in and you can’t see until you’re inside .It’s boundaries are extensive ,it’s mostly barren waste with the large olive trees that account for its name .
The arrival at the village with the woman of the Castilo de Olivo .
The book follows Lieutenant lluis Ruscalleda he is assigned to Aragonese front in 1937 he is a lawyer (in some ways you could say this is in some  part  Joan sales ), he arrives but start away doesn’t fir in his comrades seem to like a drink and he isn’t a drinker , but along the way he meets a woman the women of the Castilo de OLivo , she is an intriguing woman , that intrigues the lieutenant she became the lady of the house after she was a servant in the house  .Meanwhile Lluis is writing back to Trini his former lover that is a new woman and that is struggling with the war to bring up their son .The winter sees the brigade is sent to a quiet part of the line this brings even more problems , Lluis also writes to his brother and we also see Trini write to her old friend about her struggles with life .Add to this the war isn’t going their way and a strong streak of Catholic guilt and the church in the war , in the story we see the spanish civil war from a Catalan point of view from the losing side .A picture of the chaos that civil war is . 
29 june
Dear juli , I received a letter from Lluis the day before yesterday after weeks without one .I was so pleased to hear you are both in the same brigade .I hadn’t heard from him so long ! The only news I had was the monthly postal order he dent me without fail .
Trini on the home front so to speak worries about Lluis at the front .
I have read a number of novels about the civil war those written in recent years ,by the likes of  Manual Rivas , that look back at the aftermath and Chaos of the war once the dust had settled so to speak  his book carpenters pencil looked at being a prisoner and returning after the war .I have also read a couple of books by English languages writers written that were involved with the Spanish civil war  one by Hemingway which isn’t like this book as his writing is full of bravado  .The other is  the novella by George Orwell Homage to Catalonia ,which is the nearest to this book as it follows Orwell’s time at the front .But this book adds more dimension to the fighting given its form , which is an epistolary novel what we are given is the full picture of the fighting , life on the front line not just the fighting but the sitting on the front line .We also see from Trini the life on the home front what is it like raising a kid in the war .The characters in the book , give a full picture of the world around them ,Sales brings lots of details to the story that make the war leap of the page .as we see how the war effects each character changing the relationships but also the view of the world around them .
Have you a favourite book about the spanish civil war? - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/uncertain-glory-by-joan-sales/


If a novel with a Spanish theme is to succeed, says Juli Soleràs, the facetious antihero of this magnificent civil war novel, "the hero just has to be a bullfighter and the heroine a Gypsy and by the third chapter they must be fornicating in a tropical jungle full of wild bulls." Foreigners "will turn this huge mess into stirring stories of bullfighting and Gypsies".
Notwithstanding the cynic's jibe, the "huge mess" of 1936-39 is familiar to English-speaking readers largely through Orwell and Hemingway. Seen through Spanish eyes, Uncertain Glory – originally published in 1956 and now available in Peter Bush's superb English translation – was the first Catalan novel to depict the civil war from the defeated, republican side. Banned then mutilated by Franco's censors for its "heretical ideas" and "obscene language", it appeared, heavily revised, in this uncut version in 1971. Yet Joan Sales, who fought for the republicans in the Aragon trenches he portrays (and died in 1983), undercuts sides and causes, good and evil. As Juan Goytisolo], the exile who championed the novel in the 1950s, writes in an introduction, it gives no ground to "glib partisan flag-waving" in its grief at the absurd "procession of blood, death and injustice".
The title evokes the doomed Spanish republic, proclaimed in April 1931, through Shakespeare's "uncertain glory of an April day" in the precarious "spring of love". With three characters enamoured of the same woman, the thwarting of youthful passions against the backdrop of the war makes for an undertow of disillusionment – and a riveting read. The protagonists are former student friends from Barcelona and a brother in arms, all drawn to anarchism. Lluís de Brocà, a lawyer posted to the Aragonese front, and Trini Milmany, a geologist and "new woman" from an anarchist family, have a son together outside marriage. In epistolary form, The protagonists are former student friends from Barcelona and a brother in arms, all drawn to anarchism. Lluís writes to his brother about life in the trenches, and his enthralment to the former maid and lover of a "martyred" Francoist, whose eye is on securing the deeds to her castle. Trini's letters to their mutual friend Solerás, philosopher-cynic and mordant prophet, are a fascinating record of Barcelona's home front, with rationing, air raids and a brutal "priest hunt" across Catalonia. The final part is the retrospective wartime memoir of Cruells, a medical adjutant and would-be priest of the slums, who aspires to saving the couple's informal marriage but has his own crisis of faith.
Where Orwell encountered rats, Sales notes "battalions and brigades of flies". Drawing metaphors from putrefying donkeys and a mule's festering sores, this realist novel also juggles with ideas, from existentialism to pacifism, Spinoza to Stendhal (the author translated Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov into Catalan). There are shafts of humour. Lluís is horrified by mortajo, a regional delicacy of "sheep's belly stuffed with the unfortunate beast's entrails", from which "vapour hisses out as if it were a steam engine". Some of the sharpest satire is reserved for the "revolutionary carnival", as Barcelona's well-to-do hide in exaggerated proletarian garb. Meanwhile, in a curtain raiser for the 1960s, anarchist "free love" is exposed as yet another pretext for unscrupulous men to leave women holding the baby.
Writing under Franco, when battle lines were drawn in blood, Sales blurs them. "We were republicans because the zone … where we were born, was republican." Anarchists fire on communists. Antifascists burn churches and beat priests to death, hardening support for Franco among their victims. "Every day somebody or other changes trench … disgusted by the horrors being perpetrated by their respective rearguards." As Soleràs warned, "if we allowed the rearguard 'to fuck up' we would lose the war".
Sales's humane Christian vision is a reminder that Catholics were not all on the fascist side. Trini's belated baptism is partly protest against the murder of priests. "What was the point of so much toil, sacrifice and spilt blood?" Cruells asks. "Why hadn't the freedom to worship our Catholic religion … been re-established?"While, for Trini's uncle, "whoever comes out the winner, I will have lost", her father wants people to be "united by our feelings rather than our ideas … ideas are bloody worthless". Only Llibert, Trini's opportunistic brother and chief republican propagandist, is in his element. Shrugging off the lack of diphtheria serum for a sick child, Llibert plays God, dismissing the "tiny tragedies" of little children. Soleràs, for whom "the whole universe isn't worth the life of a single child", tells Cruells that it is such people who will be "dividing up the cake. You and I won't."
In a polyphonic novel whose voices are operatic (the pompous Llibert is a "sonorous baritone"), Bush conjures deftly with a range of registers, from the archaic dropped aitches of the Aragonese rustics to the prim eloquence of the seminarian. He and MacLehose Press have done a great service in reviving this Catalan classic. The promised sequel, The Wind in the Night, cannot come soon enough. - Maya Jaggi

Any slight understanding most non-specialists outside of Spain could claim to have acquired of the Spanish Civil War through English-language reading tends to come from the outsider-as-witness perspectives of George Orwell’s reportage in Homage to Catalonia (1938) or from Ernest Hemingway’s admittedly melodramatic classic For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). More authentically explained insights were to emerge through Javier Cercas’s eloquent lament Soldiers of Salamis (2003), which was astutely translated by Anne McLean.

Yet the conflict remains densely complicated and has left a bitter, still divisive legacy. No one will find many, if any, questions about the war clarified or explained through the pages of Catalan writer Joan Sales’s Uncertain Glory. In his wonderfully quasi-dramatic burlesque, Sales is far more concerned with depicting atmosphere and daily life, particularly the personal, as lived during a period of upheaval, than he is with attempting to explain the tangled politics.

Initially published in 1956, only to be censored by Franco’s regime, this colourful novel of competing voices was rigorously revised until a semi-final fourth version appeared in 1971. It is now offered in a definitive form. Often compared with Dostoyevsky, whose work Sales translated, its tone seems far closer to the manic exasperation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) crossed with the traces of the Russian master Mikhail Bulgakov’s comic timing.

This latest version is almost complete; the closing volume, The Wind in the Night, is due early in 2015. Written from the losing side’s viewpoint, Uncertain Glory, taking its title from Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, makes it obvious that there is a war going on but the distracted central characters are usually penning detailed letters and journal entries or having heated exchanges. This does no disservice to the book. Sales did not intend it as a historical document and although many sequences do reflect the war, he focuses on creating characters so fraught you feel yourself anticipating their next outburst. When it comes, it is often very funny. Do not expect an ordinary novel; this is an offbeat extravaganza concerned with serious issues. Most of all, Sales (1912-1983) is exploring the contrast between ideology and reality as well as their effects on social classes and the ordinary people living beyond the political factions.

His characters are exhaustive talkers; they notice things and also fume and fester, and even, occasionally, make good sense. The most interesting of these truth tellers is Juli Solerás, the anti-hero, who announces that the surest way for a novel with a Spanish theme to impress is if the hero happens to be a bullfighter “and the heroine a Gypsy and by the third chapter they must be fornicating in a tropical jungle full of wild bulls”.

Foreigners, he then believes, “will turn this huge mess into stirring stories of bullfighting and Gypsies”. The “huge mess” proves crudely effective shorthand for this most chaotic of wars. Solerás has a habit of declaiming at length and then disappearing, which adds to his mystery. His presence is ambivalent as are his intentions. Yet it is he who arrives with a generous supply of tinned milk for the young son of Trini Milmany, the bewildered and increasingly angry girlfriend of Lieut Llíus Ruscalleda, also known as de Broca and one of the three narrators. He is not really a career officer, merely a pompous lawyer in a uniform whose detailed journal sets the scene.

De Broca soon introduces some doubts about his enigmatic, former school friend: “A conversation with Solerás suddenly came to mind. At the time, it hadn’t struck me as important, having sounded like a caustic stream of incoherent nonsense. . . .” Llíus has become transfixed by the widow of the local great house. She turns out to have been a servant who caught the eye of the master and had two children with him. Aware that she needs documents, she cultivates the besotted lawyer.

It transpires that she too has met his eccentric friend and when she makes clear that she does not wish to discuss him, Llíus muses privately: “Poor Solerás, one can see how he is gifted at inspiring less than friendly reactions. People can’t forgive him his haphazard conversations, so full of paradoxes and reticence.”

The snobbish lawyer continues to ponder everything: he sounds more like an anthropologist than an officer. His narrative is rich in descriptions of examining old books and furnishings; it is as if he doesn’t associate his cultural finds with the debris of war. His attempts to seduce the wily lady of the castle juxtapose his delusions with her practicality. She makes it clear she has not forgotten her peasant origins.

Back in Barcelona, Trini, minding the son she had with Llíus, is frantic; her letters rarely attract more than a curt response, so she takes to bombarding Solerás with her woes. The three had all been young radicals while back at university; there they nurtured fashionably vague revolutionary notions. Trini is feisty and opinionated and usually refers to herself as a geologist before correcting this to “a student of geology”. She is at war with her mother but empathises with her despairing idealist father. Aware that she had not planned on spending her days alone with a child, Trini moves on from simpering devotion to resentment and then anger.

The voices are all brilliantly rendered. Best of all is the hapless Cruells, a male nurse and increasingly failed seminarian. He tries to help the doomed young couple but becomes more involved than he intended. There is an element of Shakespearean comedy about the relationships. Yet Sales can quickly change tone. Trini recalls the “horribly hot night” she heard shots and went out to investigate: “He was very old and his soutane had turned green from wear, it was patched and mended. His eyes and mouth were open.” When the local magistrate finally arrives he confirms that the victim is an old village priest. “Marauding gangs of hotheads go round the villages burning churches and murdering priests and they often bring them back to Barcelona to kill. . . . We find them every morning,”

A claustrophobic sense of Barcelona under siege, enduring rationing and air raids as well as the deadly priest-hunts, emerge from her letters which although dominated by her fears for a dying relationship, are delivered as if part of a conversation and always convince.

Sales moves the diverse cast of characters around with such lightness of touch. Just when it seems that his vivacious novel can soar no higher, Crulls takes over. This weedy dreamer is the true heart of the story and he points out that in common with Solerás and Llíus, he too was an orphan raised by an aunt. Crulls listens as Solerás indulges in yet another heady rant and although he overhears Crulls mutter “You’ve lost me.” he misses the irony and increasing the theatricality of his rhetoric, continues: “I’m lost too. . . yes, I have lost myself. . .”, only to blame his plight on the Freudians.

In this revelation of a novel about a war that is treated as a bizarre abstraction seething somewhere off-stage, there comes a moment of staggering clarity. It is of course experienced by Crulls: “A tiny tank suddenly appeared in front of me, perhaps one of those small ones that had advanced quicker than the others and lost its way in the woods. It moved along the small ridge of my line of vision, slowly, like a caterpillar on a precarious branch. . . . It seemed so peculiar. . . as surprising as a tram might have been.”

No one could accuse Sales of writing an overly factual work larded with detail – it’s not – yet to read his bravura novel is to feel part of the shouting, the opinions, the confusion, the half-baked arguments, the terror, the regrets. Talk makes wars but it fails to win them. Sales has evoked a moment in time and Peter Bush’s vibrant, multi-voiced translation had conveyed the energy, romance and the freshness of a masterwork that will seduce anew with its passion, humour, pathos and the all too-human spats of anger. Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent. - Eileen Battersby