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Non fiction

DIATRIBAS MANUELINAS

By ANTÓN CAPELÁN REY

About this book

In this book, professor Antón Capelán gathers a series of short articles published in the Galician press between 1990-2000 with three unpublished articles: “Valentín Paz-Andrade carves his image”, “Castelao, theatre actor” and “Avilés de Taramancos and Castelao”.

When we see all these texts on such diverse writers and intellectuals, we realise that there seems to be an underlying current that gives homogeneity to the work. The main lines of thought behind the book are memory, oblivion, and misunderstandings. In this book, the author walks the thin line between historic rigour and a commitment to the national and working class memory in a simple approach.

Book fragment

Already many years ago, in a moment of tremendous hyperbole by the opposition leader, former Spanish president Felipe González said that Fraga Iribarne could not fit the State in his head. We are not sure whether he was speaking about a democratic or authoritarian state. It is true, however, fitting that Leviathan in the head of the former Franco minister must have involved expelling the most elementary intellectual dignity, as in any other way we could not understand that at present, at his age and as president of the Galician regional government, he published “A man called Álvaro Cunqueiro”. Let us not be mistaken, there is no need to be a sharp literary critic to guess that the speech read in Barcelona was not penned by him. Otherwise, nobody could understand that in April he read a speech that was quite clever in its expression, with remarkable erudition –sometimes second hand, we have to say too -- on Cunqueiro and the relationship of Galician culture to Catalonia, with literary value, and then in the month of May he read a really mediocre speech called, “Álvaro Cunqueiro, Galician ingenious gentleman”? There are also quite revealing quotations. We cannot believe that this politician had read the Catalan versions of “Deu poemas gallecs” by Tomás Garcés or the “Cantares d’Amore Cantares d’Amigo” by Carles Riba.