Acceso usuarios
Maryellen Bieder
Observing the explosion of "historical memory" surfacing in recent novels, films and documentaries, the historian Helen Grahan adjudges the phenomenon "a subject of extraordinary importance now in Spain." Carme Riera engages in this Castilian "version", "La mitad del alma"(2005). A richly textured and ambivalently orchestrated work, "La meitat" records the fictional account of a contemporary Catalan woman author's attempted recovery of her family's, her country's and her own past through letters, photographs, memories, intervieews, and documents. Although it addresses some of the core questions about history, memory, heroism and truth posed by "Soldados de Salamina", it offers a very different way of understanding them. Its nuanced contribution to the recovery of historical memory (especially Republican memory) in Catalonia tacks in a different direction from other works by problematizing the construction and interpretation of history.
