Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past

Should come with a warning that the print/font is really small and very difficult to read.

If you have time to read only one book about Spain, Ghosts of Spain, would be my pick for you. I have been to Spain several times: to Valderama for the Ryder Cup; to the Pyrenees to hike; to Barcelona to see Gaudi's works; to Bilbao to see "Puppy" and the Gehry Guggenheim; and to Guernica because of Picasso's painting of the same name. There is little in Spain that hasn't captured my interest. Ghosts of Spain has pulled together my varied experiences and has made sense of them. Ghosts is rich with history, pre- and post Franco, and with a devoted admirer's unravelling of modern Spain's political, economic, artistic, and social sensibilities. Read Ghosts and you will arrive in Spain to find that Giles Tremlett has given you an amazing gift, a "Rosetta Stone" for Spain. Whether you speak Spanish or not, Tremlett's Ghosts will make the new and the strange feel familiar. If you already know Spain, I suspect that Ghosts is even more of a "must read."

A British journalist who has lived 20 years in Spain, married and raising his 2 children in Madrid, the author investigates, reveals and muses upon Spanish culture, history and the forces of the "two Spains" as they come together, or rub against each other, in forming the modern Spanish world. A fascinating look at Spain, its subcultures from the Basques to the Catalans to flamenco to the Galicians, to drug culture to tourism and the very difficult and delicate process of choosing to forget the differences of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's regime in order to move forward in a country that was once the most powerful on earth. I like Spain and its history. This is one of the very best insights into modern Spain. Highly recommended.

This is a great journalistic account of the social and political changes that have transformed Spain up to the present day. Tremlett discusses the country's past and present in fairly equal measure. He begins by looking at the legacies of the Spanish Civil War, discussing how only in the past decade has the full scale of the atrocities that took place come to light. He discusses how Spaniards whose relatives were killed by the Francoists have pushed in recent years for their relatives to be given decent burials. He also writes an interesting chapter on Franco's overall legacy, arguing that after his death and the country's transition to democracy he has been largely purged from public discourse. Despite this collective amnesia that he identifies, Tremlett points out that the same left-right cleavage that drove the war still lurks below the surface of Spanish society. The book also contains chapters on the Basque, Catalan, and Galician regions. Tremlett provides very insightful analysis of the origins of and main forces behind Basque and Catalan nationalism, while his chapter on Galicia details that region's emergence as a conduit for Columbian cocaine. One of my favorite chapters looked at gender relations in Spain, in which Tremlett provides some very amusing anecdotes that reveal contrasts between Spain and his native Britain. This chapter also discusses Tremlett's quest to understand the paradox of how a country can be so awash in brothels (which, he reports, 1/4 of Spanish men visited) yet relatively conservative in terms of the sexual mores of its people. Other subjects covered here include Spain's emergence as a global tourism magnet (and the corruption that has often emerged alongside it) and the 2004 Madrid train bombing, which indirectly led to the defeat of the ruling party in the elections several days later. This was an interesting chapter, in which Tramlett looked at the ways in which the main parties tried to capitalize on this tragedy for political gain. Overall, I found Tremlett to be a very keen analyst of social and political relations, and there weren't really any weak chapters. For instance, I considered skipping a chapter on flamenco music, not being particularly interested in the musical form itself, but the chapter ended up including a fascinating discussion of the social history of Spain's gypsies. Overall, I would heartily recommend this book to anybody interested in Spanish history, culture, and/or politics. I would NOT recommend it to those expecting more of a travel guide type of book; although Tremlett does visit and write evocatively about numerous regions, such descriptions are not the main substance of this book. If I had to make one minor criticism, it is that the chapters themselves were often not tightly organized. For example, the chapter on the Basques jumps from past to present and does not really follow any sort of structure. This wasn't really a problem for me, because Tremlett writes well and never bore

Giles Tremlett has written a highly readable, incisive portrait of Spain today--its problems and its pleasures. His presentation of the manner in which Spain has chosen to deal with the aftermath of Francisco Franco's death is particularly well written and revealing. He examines how the decades of dictatorship and brutal repression have been swept under the rug of collective consciousness by Spaniards choosing not to confront it or attempt to reconcile themselves with this difficult episode in their nation's history. The author's years of closely observing Spain, and reporting on its politics and culture for Britain's most respected newspaper, The Guardian, have given him a wonderful sense of both the large picture and the quotidian details, which do so much to bring this book to life. Anyone wanting a sense of what today's Spain is all about will find it in these pages.

Having been to Spain a number of times since 1991, I always sensed that Spain was "different" from any other western European country. REcently I attended a Hemingway field study in Madrid by R. W. Burda, and I read this book before and during my stay. I can't say enough about the book--Giles Tremlett must have researched for years. I highly recommend this to anyone visiting or living in Spain as an expatriate, as Tremlett himself does. He begins with the ghastly Civil War years (perfect companion piece to the understanding of Hemingway's FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS and SUN ALSO RISES), the Franco years, pointing out that King Juan Carlos is the first-ever king elected by a dictator! For a country full of loquacious people (138,000 bars in Spain, more that any other European country!), they are eerily silent about the painful past. ...if you want to start to understand what makes Spaniards tick, read this book. Better yet, buy it along with a ticket to Madrid and read it there in all the tapas bars you can manage to get to!