La herencia de una guerra perdida. La memoria multidireccional en Los rojos de ultramar de Jordi Soler

Abstract

Los rojos de Ultramar (2004), by the Mexican author Jordi Soler, is a novel that looks into the memory of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, and explores both individual and collective consequences of these events through the experience of exiles. The narrator of the novel, a fictional version of the author, is the grandson of a Spanish republican exile who decides to reconstruct his grandfather’s biography. The book shares many formal and thematic features with several recent Spanish memory novels, such as Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas and Mala gente que camina by Benjamin Prado, in which the historical research of a narrator-character functions as the motor of the narrative. However, Los rojos de ultramar contributes a novel point of view to the ongoing debate over the interpertation of the Spanish recent past from outside the national borders. Through the voice of the narrator, who grew up at the intersection of two cultures (the Mexican and the Catalan) and two languages (Castilian and Catalan), Soler’s novel provides a transnational and multicultural perspective that bears resemblance to the model of multidirectional memory proposed by Michael Rothberg. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to identify the narrative features that Los rojos de ultramar shares with the memory novels by Spanish authors and, on the other hand, to discuss the particular contribution of this work that promotes cultural hybridity and uses the memory of a specific group (Spanish Republican exiles) in an exemplary way in order to create solidarity between different cultural groups.