Chaves Nogales: walk, see and tell

Francisco Cánovas Sánchez presents us in this entertaining and meticulous, documented book, The interrelationship between Chaves Nogales and the peak moments of the last century. So we’re not before a biography. Not just. The hero’s life adventures are told in the first chapter of about a hundred pages. Then the work explores the Russian revolution, the Second Republic, the Civil War, Nazism, etc. structured into sections. Each presents the facts and analyzes how Chaves Nogales reported on them.

The author generously quotes María Isabel Cintas, the great Spanish expert on Chaves Nogales., author of a canonical biography: Manuel Chaves, the counting profession. And we are told by various publishers, if not always the majority, and by Muñoz Molina, Trapiello, etc. It reminds me that there are writers like general public. Chaves was the son and nephew of journalists. His uncle, El Liberal, was the director of Seville, and his father became the official historian of the city. In this environment, his profession was brilliantly channeled and It didn’t take long for him to publish articles about his hometown and about him, some of which have stood the test of time amazingly.. This proves his common sense and prudence.

His second stage was La Voz de Córdoba and from there he jumped to Madrid. First to Heraldo, then to Now, the big project of his life in 1930. Rented for 3,000 pesetas a month (and a floor with a view of the Royal Palace) by its owner and manager, Luis Montiel, Chaves Nogales has transformed the headline into a modern, well-written, illustrated, influential, Azañista, democratic and republican newspaper, but far from it. from surpluses. When the Civil War came, Cánovas Sánchez tells us: It lasts a few months, but fearing for his life, he goes to France, where he founds the newspaper Sprint.. His last days would be running a news agency in London in the middle of World War II. There, he met the journalist from Malaga Esteban Salazar Chapela, among others. Of this relationship, he has a novel in London. Or a test. Definitely. Knowing that you’re dead a Franco court sentenced him to ten years in prison and disqualification. That was the absurdity. Still, as he once said, it wouldn’t be strange for a red mob to give him a pass.

Chaves Nogales is not third SpainOffended because it’s indestructible? and because, whoever it was, he simply described what he saw. Undistorted reality with clear prose. He talked about how ridiculous Goebbels seemed to him, what he thought about life in Soviet Russia, what he thought about the debates in the Courts of the Republic, or what was morally going on in France so as not to resist the Germans. He told and told, but he also had time to fictionalize inspired by reality.: Ahí es nada A sangre y fuego is a series of dominating stories about the Civil War with a must-read preface in high school.

Despite the shortness of his life, Chaves left plenty of work. Lots of books. A few were originally written in installments for newspapers. “Political sectarianism and academic conservatism, writes the author of this book, hid Chaves Nogales under a heavy slab of oblivion for decades, but in the 1990s the work of leading intellectuals put him in his rightful place.”

According to researcher Charo Ramos, a quoted place in the book “places him on the same level as Joseph Roth or George Orwell among those who go to the printing press, thanks to his independence of criteria”. As Chaves Nogales said in a presentation of one of his works in 1928, always tried to appeal to the “general public, not the documented expert”. And by doing so “by resisting any desire for personal comment that might attack me.” His work is alive and constitutes a monument to true journalism. This book reflects that strikingly.