The Speed of Light

by Javier Cercas

Overview

Javier Cercas' third and most ambitious novel has already been heralded in Spain as "daring," "magnificent, complex, and intense," and "a master class in invention and truth."As a young writer, the novel's protagonist-perhaps an apocryphal version of Cercas himself-accepts a post at a Midwestern university and soon he is in the United States, living a simple life, working and writing. It will be years before he understands that his burgeoning friendship with the Vietnam vet Rodney Falk, a strange and solitary man, will reshape his life, or that he will become obsessed with Rodney's mysterious past.
Why does Rodney shun the world? Why does he accept and befriend the narrator? And what really happened at the mysterious 'My Khe' incident? Many years pass with these questions unanswered; the two friends drift apart. But as the narrator's literary career takes off, his personal life collapses. Suddenly, impossibly, the novelist finds that Rodney's fate and his own are linked, and the story spirals towards its fascinating, surreal conclusion. Twisting together his own regrets with those of America, Cercas weaves the profound and personal story of a ghostly past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608190751
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	05/20/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Javier Cercas is the author of Soldiers of Salamis (Spain, 2001, Bloomsbury, 2003), The Tenant & The Motive (Spain 2000, 2003, Bloomsbury UK, 2005) El Vientre de la ballena (The Belly of the Whale, 1997) and Relatos Reales (True Tales, 2000). He has taught at the University of Illinois and since 1989 has been a lecturer in Spanish literature at the University of Gerona.
Javier Cercas is a lecturer in Spanish Literature at the University of Gerona. Soldiers of Salamis has been published in fifteen languages.

Editorial Reviews

An unnamed narrator's life comes full circle as he confronts buried secrets and tragedy in this powerful novel by Spanish author Cercas (Soldiers of Salamis). The unnamed narrator, a young writer whose hustle to survive in Barcelona doesn't leave him time to write, takes a scholarship as an assistant Spanish professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, in the late 1980s. Once there he makes an unlikely friend in office mate Rodney Falk, a Vietnam vet who everyone else in the department thinks is insane. After Rodney disappears during winter break, the narrator visits Rodney's father, who fills him in on Rodney's troubled past. Back in Spain a year later, the narrator becomes a successful novelist, but remains haunted by Rodney (and his skeletons) which the narrator wants to write into a novel. From the electric passages chronicling the narrator's descent into writerly paralysis to his discovery of Rodney's miserable end and then his own creative resurrection, Cercas writes with verve and brings the novel to a close in a mad sardonic swoop. Cercas has delivered a wry and touching examination of the ruinous effects of war and fame. (Apr.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

In the late 1980s, the narrator of this latest work by Cercas (literature, Univ. of Gerona, Spain; Soldiers of Salamis) enrolls as a graduate assistant in the doctoral Spanish program at the University of Illinois. His fellow officemate is surly, eccentric Vietnam War veteran Rodney Falk, with whom he strikes up an unexpected friendship. We gain deeper insight into the reasons for Rodney's shell-shocked behavior as his past gradually unfolds, climaxing in the revelation of his involvement in a My Lai-like massacre. Cercas eventually explains their friendship by linking the guilt Falk harbors with the narrator's feeling responsible for the accidental death of his wife and son. Cercas injects numerous autobiographical elements into the story, yet one is equally amazed at this Spaniard's ability to write so vividly and hauntingly about the Vietnam War and the trauma of postbattle fatigue in light of his being only 13 when the fighting ended. Translator McLean (also responsible for Cercas's recent Soldiers of Salamis, another novel about the consequences of war) has produced a work so smooth that it doesn't even read like a translation. Highly recommended.-Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A Spanish novelist writes a novel about a Spanish novelist telling an American Vietnam vet's story, which may be apocryphal. "All novels are autobiographical," writes Cercas. Like his unnamed narrator, Cercas taught at the University of Illinois and published a successful novel about the Spanish Civil War (Soldiers of Salamis, 2004). Eighteen years ago, in Urbana, the narrator met Rodney Falk, a one-eyed, misanthropic survivor of two Vietnam tours. When Rodney disappears, his father gives the narrator three file boxes of Rodney's letters, implicitly asking the narrator to write Rodney's life. Back in Spain, the narrator does research, but can't write. Years later, when the narrator's Civil War book becomes popular, Rodney shows up in Spain with a warning about success the narrator doesn't heed, thus losing his wife and child and becoming as catatonic as Rodney used to be. Finally writing The Speed of Light (part autobiography and part biography of Rodney) saves the narrator's life. To reinforce the illusion of autobiography, Cercas uses a self-limiting nonfiction style-a pedestrian language that tells and analyzes rather than shows. But the guilt of Vietnam as a metaphor for the horror of succumbing to celebrity? Another non-American writer might get away with that, but Cercas doesn't. In this game with and against readers, the novelist has tied one artful hand behind his back. Trouble is, the hand in front mostly points at himself, whomever that might be.

Kirkus Reviews

An almost extravagant display of artistic control in which an intricate web of verbal and thematic cross-reference spins out across the text…It is hard to imagine that a better novel will be published in Spain this year.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK)

From the Publisher