http://internetreviewofbooks.com/dec08/for_a_sack_of_bones.html

Unmarked Spanish graves

FOR A SACK OF BONES

By Lluís-Anton Baulenas (translated from the Catalan by Cheryl Leah Morgan)359 pp. Harcourt $25Reviewed by Rebeca SchillerThis November, Spain’s most noted jurist, Judge Baltasar Garzon, reversed the indictment of human rights crimes against the late Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his regime, anddropped the investigation into the atrocities and disappearances of many Spanish Republicansthat occurred during and after the Spanish Civil War. In his novel

For a Sack of Bones

,Catalonian novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Lluís-Anton Baulenas tackles this very subjectand takes readers back to the time of the war to witness the horrors and atrocities of Franco’sconcentration camps and charity orphanages, and ten years later to the “sinister regime based oncorruption and abuse of authority.”Sergeant Genís Aleu, a Spanish Foreign Legionnaire, narrates the story of a promise he made tohis dying father—to find the unmarked grave of his father’s best friend and to give the remains adecent burial in Barcelona. Right from the novel’s beginning, we know where Genís stands.“Franco’s Regime makes me sick,” he writes. “I find it despicable.” And from this first sentencein the book’s prologue, we learn how the events of the war, and the post-war, have left the youngand cynical Legionnaire with a taste for vengeance.As a parallel narrative,

For a Sack of Bones

also tells the story of the young Genís, known asNiso to his family and friends (when he was a child) and after the war as an adult with a mission.Niso’s story starts in Barcelona; he is an innocent entangled, like many other children in Spain,in the web of war and defeat. His father volunteers to fight with the Republican army and later isincarcerated in the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp after the Republic is crushed by Franco.The boy’s mother, left with no means to take care of him, takes Niso to a Charity House inBarcelona, one of many throughout Spain whose wards are orphans, poor children, and theabandoned elderly. Here the young boy stays with the hope of being reunited with his family.That yearning is fulfilled when Niso’s gravely ill father returns from the camp and makes his