This was quite a challenging read, and although I enjoyed aspects of it, overall I remained unengaged and in fact found some of it quite tedious. It’s a time-shift novel, moving between early 18th century Spain and the 1970s, with Franco’s death imminent. If I didn’t know at least something of Spain’s’ history I think I would have found the book even harder to relate to – especially when it came to 18th century court politics and Napoleon’s exploits in the country. The earlier time frame explores Goya and his relationship with Charles IV, whilst the 1970s section concentrates on troubled Sandro Vasari, an art historian writing a biography of the great artist. This contemporary section I found the least successful, not least because Vasari is not a sympathetic character in any way. The parts of the book I really did enjoy were the purely art historical sections and the analysis of Goya’s art – with a tablet by my side I thoroughly enjoyed looking up the works mentioned and examining them in some detail. But I could have done that with any art history book, and I didn’t feel that incorporating such analysis into a novel added anything to the narrative. If anything it slowed down what is already a fairly slow novel. The mix of fiction, non-fiction and art history is relatively well integrated into the whole, but nevertheless overall I found the book unsatisfactory on many levels. An exploration of power and the duty of the artist to represent it truthfully makes for some thought-provoking reading at times, but the long passages about bull-fighting were, for me, unnecessary. An interesting novel, but not a very enjoyable one.

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The Valley of the Fallen (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Carlos Rojas (translated by Edith Grossman) is a historical novel taking in different time periods in Spain. Mr. Rojas is an award-winning novelist and art historian.

Artist Francisco de Goya is at the most successful time of his career. He is the painter, and sounding board, of King Fernando VI who is dedicated to establish a cruel regime after Spain’s War of Independence.

The Valley of the Fallen (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Carlos Rojas (translated by Edith Grossman) is a very dense book, written in a postmodernist narrative which shifts between the court of King Charles IV of Spain (around the late 1700s) and the last days of Francisco Franco’s reign (mid 1970s).

The narrative merges fact and fiction, to tell two stories that even though are worlds apart, are still connected through a common language, ideology, politics, and art.

This is a dense read, I am not as familiar with Goya’s paintings Mr. Rojas is, so my reading was slowed down by looking them up on the Internet whenever they were mentioned. On the bright side, I could look up Goya’s paintings on the Internet at any time I wanted to.
We live in a wonderful age.

There is a helpful timeline at the end of the book, which I actually skimmed after I read a few chapters just to help me understand the narrative. My only complaint is about myself for not being able to read it in the original Spanish.

As usual, Ms. Grossman did a fantastic job with the translation, the prose is stylish, energetic and somewhat intimate.

A swirling series of narratives that merge fact and fiction in postmodernist style, shifting between Goya painting at the court of Charles IV in the C19th, and a biographer writing about Goya during Franco's last days. Rojas is excellent on 'reading' Goya's paintings in some detail and it's well worth reading with a tablet at hand so that you can Google the art works - I learned a lot by doing this.

The themes which emerge are of politics and art, of despotism and tyranny, and how to capture both a 'soul' and the impact of ideology on canvas.

There's a timeline at the back which is helpful to anyone less familiar with either Goya or Spanish history. This is a dense read at times but also surprisingly intimate, and told via an energetic prose style that is all about the voice.