The Speed of Light

Having now made five or six attempts at beginning this review, I am coming to the conclusion that THE SPEED OF LIGHT is a particularly difficult book to review. So I will try a somewhat pointillistic approach and hope that some sort of picture emerges. There are two protagonists. First, the anonymous narrator, who is a writer from Barcelona. At the time of his tale (2005?), he is in his forties. The second is Rodney Falk, a Vietnam war veteran who spent the 35 years after the war trying to put his war experiences behind him and somehow carve out a stable life for himself. The two of them meet in the late '80s when they share an office as teaching assistants in the Spanish Department at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Against all odds, they end up forging a friendship, albeit a strange and sometimes strained one. There are two main settings: Barcelona and its environs, and Urbana, Illinois and a town not far away, Rantoul. The first half of the story takes place in the late '80s, with much of that consisting of the narrator learning some (but not all) of Rodney Falk's harrowing and traumatic experiences in Vietnam. The second half of the novel takes place around 2002 to 2004, when Rodney Falk reappears in the narrator's life after 14 years and the narrator learns even more about his time in Vietnam. The novel is elaborately plotted. It also is ornately told. It is marked (some might say "marred") by long, baroque sentences, many lengthened by numerous conjunctions, others by a thicket of subordinate clauses. In my opinion, it is over-written. The theme that almost all readers will note and remember has to do with the American experience in Vietnam and how it scarred so many of the American soldiers who survived the fighting. It is both astonishing and disconcerting to find a Spaniard writing so close to the raw quick about that episode of the American experience, both in Southeast Asia and here at home. I believe THE SPEED OF LIGHT to be a worthy addition to the literature of Vietnam and its aftermath in the United States. Another theme has to do with success and failure in one's career, and since the narrator is a writer, the question of success and failure for him also entails the questions of what it is to be a writer and what's more important to a novel -- the telling or the truth. I found this theme much less convincingly or memorably handled. Yet another theme or issue -- not as obvious as the first two or as persistent -- concerns the ethics of journalism. A question posed by the novel is: which is more important, people or The Truth? When, for example, journalists get on the trail of a 35-year-old story about Tiger Force, an autonomous U.S. platoon that essentially acted as an American guerrilla force, are there any ethical qualms about hounding, in the name of The Truth, former American soldiers who have struggled for years to put the past behind them and for whom publicity will ruin them? (To my mind, it is

I can't think of a better novel about Viet Nam, or, for that matter, about all the wars since Korea. And it's set in Urbana and Barcelona. I'd say go figure, but then GUARD OF HONOR, perhaps the best novel about WWII, was set in Florida. Maybe it's because Moltke the Elder was right when he said "Everything in war is very simple." Life is different.

This novel can be better understood if we also read Sol de medianoche (Midnight sun) by the Puerto Rican writer Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá. The plots are very similar and Cercas had reviewed Rodríguez Juliá's novel ten years before La velocidad de la luz (The Speed of Light) came to light.

This novel contains apparently some of autobiography and so, mentions sometimes his previous work, "Soldados de Salamina". Because the protagonist is, more or less, a copy of the author, at first, a young aspirant to writer. At the beginning he works and survives poorly in Barcelona. A teacher and scholar from these university recommends him for a vacancy as Spanish language and literature teacher in a village of the USA near Chicago. There, his economical situation is better, and he knows the American country and another people, but the most important, which becomes a friend, is Rodney Falk. Rodney, 41 years old, more ten years older than the young Spanish, is an ex - combatant of Vietnam War and prey of terrible sense of guilt owing his war past. He had a brother killed in that war before he decided to change his destination in Vietnam from a business desk to a special hard fighting group. Rodney's father, a widow physician, is a right man, but he doesn't understand fully the troubles of his son, because himself was a soldier during World War II and he thinks Vietnam was a similar war. Perhaps owing to loneliness, Rodney and the author trust one in another. Rodney marries and gets some jobs, but his remorse and feeling of guilt make sterile his efforts. He drinks and has several psychiatric crisis. Two years later, the author returns to Spain, works hard, writes "Soldados de Salamina", a novel that deals with an episode of Spanish Civil War that becomes a success at the level of Spain. The novel is translated and known also in USA and in the literary world, and after a sort of period of big economical and social recognizing, including some conjugal infidelities, one night after a hard discussion the wife and little child of the author results killed in a car accident, so, he falls in a deep depression and lives isolated for a time, but then, Rodney reappears in travelling to Spain, so the two old friends have an brief encounter in Madrid when finally Rodney tells him his full story and returns to the USA. The end is tragic and the Spanish author returns to the USA when he has a meeting with Rodney's wife and with his old American friends: some have succeeded in life, some not.