Winds of the Night

Winds of the Night is the follow-up, published almost thirty years later, to Joan Sales's acclaimed masterwork of the Spanish Civil War, Uncertain Glory. It describes the shell-shocked wasteland that was postwar Catalonia through the eyes of Cruells, a Republican chaplain who survives the war and completes his theological studies only to lose his faith in a world where it seems all hope has been extinguished.

As Cruells struggles to function as a rural priest, his steps are dogged by ghostly figures from his past, such as Lamoneda, a fascist agent provocateur. Against his wishes, Cruells is drawn into obsessive dialogues about the war in which only lunacy prevails, for Lamoneda seems to possess the key to the whereabouts of an old friend--the mercurial Juli Soler s, whose charisma, for all his betrayals, still holds Cruells in thrall.

A delirious, excoriating performance, comparable in spirit to the work of Thomas Bernhard, Winds of the Night offers a phantasmagorical vision of a traumatized country caught in the vise of fascism.