FRANCO S CRYPT

An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural artifacts of Francos Spain History is written by the victors: Its a cliché, but a reliable one'except in the case of the Spanish Civil War. Here, it is the losers version of events that has been believed. In his groundbreaking new book, Francos Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936, Jeremy Treglown argues that the result has been a double distortion. Inside Spain, as well as outside, many believe'wrongly'that under Francisco Francos 1939-75 dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. And this myth reinforces another: that there was and continues to be a national pact to forget what really happened. As a result, foreign narratives'For Whom the Bell Tolls, Casablanca, Homage to Catalonia'still have greater credibility than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de España was, as its name asserts, Spains own war, and in recent years the country has begun to 'reclaim' this crucial aspect of its modern history. Francos Crypt reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at whats actually there'monuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies, computer games'and considers, in a captivating narrative, the totality of what it shows. The result is a much-needed reexamination of a history we only thought we knew.