Blind Sunflowers

Blind Sunflowers
By Alberto Méndez
Translated by Nick Caistor
Arcadia Books £10.99 110 pages
FT Bookshop price: £8.79

Madrid publisher Alberto Méndez only wrote one book in his life. A year after his death in 2004, it won Spain’s National Prize for Literature. Bleak and beautifully written, Blind Sunflowers consists of four tales set just after the Spanish civil war.

A captain in Franco’s army marches over and surrenders to the Republicans on the very day the Fascists proclaim victory. An 18-year-old poet and his pregnant lover fail to escape over the Pyrénées to France. She dies during childbirth: he and his new baby son freeze to death.

A Republican prisoner stops comforting his executioner with lies and thereby loses his own life.

Méndez’s grim stories focus on the hopelessness of the defeated. However, they offer no sweeping polarities and refuse to accept the simplicity of a binary world: left versus right, freedom versus oppression, good versus evil. Here, suffering is universal.