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 who now hobnobs with Himmler and misses few opportunities to turn the febrile postwar atmosphere to his financial advantage. Against his wishes, Cruells is drawn into obsessive dialogues about the war in which only lunacy prevails, for Lamoneda seems to hold the key to the whereabouts of an old friend—the mercurial Juli Soleras, whose charisma, for all his betrayals, still holds Cruells in thrall.

An essential coda to the modern classic that is Uncertain Glory, Winds of the Night is a Beckettian vision of the traumas of combatants and country hidden beneath the rhetoric of the victors.