Pas pleurer

In Pas pleurer, Lydie Salvayre’s mother, at the end of her life, tells her daughter about the libertarian revolution of 1936 in Spain. Alongside her account the book follows the writer Georges Bernanos, who was living in Majorca when the civil war broke out. At first sympathetic to Franco’s movement, Bernanos was shocked by the savagery of the fighting and by the Spanish clergy’s complicity, and wrote a fierce anti-Francoist pamphlet, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune, from which Salvayre quotes. The novel includes many untranslated passages in Spanish.