The reissue of works such as ‘Requiem por un campesino Español’ and the rediscovery of his war novel about the Spanish Civil War bring one of the great chroniclers of the 20th century back into the spotlight.
Ramón J. Sender (1901-1982) was born at the dawn of the 20th century in 'that boiling point in the villages full of silence,' as he recalled in the first volume of ‘Crónica del alba.’ It was a heat wave 'in which pigeons seek shade and time seems to stand still and acquire depth in a thousand little noises.'
Like the Inuit, who distinguish a million shades of white in the snow, that lonely child from Chalamera (Huesca) learned to break down silence and boredom into millions of modulations, and with his keen ear he became the great chronicler of that century that ran parallel to his life.
