{"id":7876,"date":"2019-04-15T07:17:20","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T11:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7876"},"modified":"2019-04-18T11:39:42","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T15:39:42","slug":"the-horsemans-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7876","title":{"rendered":"****The Horseman’s Song"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Ben Pastor \u2013 This book is one of Ben Pastor\u2019s six detective novels featuring German intelligence officer Martin Bora and a prequel to novels covering Bora\u2019s activities during the Second World War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the book opens, it\u2019s summer 1937, in the midst of the\nSpanish Civil War. Two tiny encampments located high in the rocky sierras of\nAragon overlook a valley, a cane-lined brook, and the small town of Teruel. Bora\nheads one of these camps, comprising about seven Nationalists; the other, near\nenough for occasional sniper-fire, is similarly sized and led by American\nvolunteer Philip Walton. Walton is a World War I veteran, a couple of decades older\nthan Bora, and has joined the Republican side less because of conviction and\nmore because he can\u2019t think of anything better to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The men in both camps are a ragtag bunch and more prone to\nfollow their own inclinations than any official orders. Neither unit is interested\nin attacking the other, preferring to save their energies for a big battle\nrumored to be coming soon. The proximity of these two encampments is\nillustrated by the fact that both Bora and Walton both visit the same\nprostitute high on the mountaintop. For Bora, the encounters with this young\nwoman are life-changing; for Walton, they\u2019re a painful reminder he\u2019s aging. Yet\nthey inspire destructive sexual jealousy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bora finds the body of a stranger shot in the head on the road below his encampment and wonders how this stranger ended up there. Walton also knows about the corpse, plus he knows who the man is: his friend Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca (pictured), the revered poet and playwright, homosexual, and staunch Republican. Walton and his men bury Garc\u00eda Lorca\u2019s partway up the mountain; Bora\u2019s scouts find the grave, remove the body, and bury it elsewhere. The official story\u2014in the novel as well as in real life\u2014is that Garc\u00eda Lorca was murdered in 1936 outside Granada. The authorities on both sides would prefer that Bora and Walton let the official story stand unquestioned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Separately, they conduct a somewhat clandestine investigation\nof the events of the fatal night and the motives of various people who might have\nbeen involved. It\u2019s slow going, because Walton and Bora are mostly otherwise engaged.\nThe times themselves dampen progress further. If Bora wants to send a message\nto Teruel, someone has to get on a donkey and take it. A response won\u2019t arrive\nfor hours. If Walton wants to investigate an event in the village of Castellar,\nhe must climb the mountain to do so. The overall impression is of a hostile\nenvironment that\u2019s dusty and hot, hot, hot. Author Pastor does an admirable job\nevoking the landscape, the conditions, and the way things got done (or not)\neight decades ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With their murder investigations limping along, there is\nample opportunity for exploring the characters of both Walton and Bora, as well\nas several of their underlings. Pastor\u2019s writing style is dense and full of\npsychological insight. Her short scenes feel almost like an hour-by-hour\nbulletin on camp activities. And, of course, writing about Garc\u00eda Lorca gives\nthe opportunity for pithy epigrams from his wonderful poems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ben Pastor is the pseudonym for Maria Verbena Volpi. Born in\nRome, she holds dual citizenship in Italy and the United States. Though Martin\nBora is fictional, he was inspired by Claus von Stauffenberg, best known for\nhis leading role in the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By Ben Pastor \u2013 This book is one of Ben Pastor\u2019s six detective novels featuring German intelligence officer Martin Bora and a prequel to novels covering Bora\u2019s activities during the Second World War. As the book opens, it\u2019s summer 1937, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7877,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****The Horseman's Song - It's 1937, the Spanish Civil war, and two opposing camps, high in the dusty hot mountains of Aragon kill time, waiting for battle. Then a troubling murder occurs, and both sides try to solve it.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,266,3,126],"tags":[1545,973,436,1546],"class_list":["post-7876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-history","category-mystery","category-reading-2","tag-ben-pastor","tag-federico-garcia-lorca","tag-spanish-civil-war","tag-the-horsemans-song"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Federico-Garc%C3%ADa-Lorca.jpg?fit=300%2C180&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-232","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7876"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7879,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7876\/revisions\/7879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}