Anatomie jednoho okamžiku – Cercas Javier (2018)

Javier Cercas captured the eighteen-hour coup that began on February 23, 1981, at 6:23 PM in the Spanish parliament in Madrid in an extraordinarily engaging way in his novel. A group of armed guards burst into the hall and shortly thereafter ordered the terrified deputies and government members to lie on the ground. This act marked the beginning of an attempted coup, whose primary goal was to remove the outgoing incompetent government of Adolfo Suárez and replace it with a 'government of national unity' led by a military representative in the spirit of 'guided democracy.' All the present politicians, journalists, and parliamentary staff obeyed the orders of the coup plotters and lay down on the ground, except for three men: the outgoing Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez, his Minister of Defense Gutiérrez Mellado, and the leader of the Spanish communists Santiago Carrillo. In this single moment seemed to concentrate all the moments of the following hours, days, and months, but to a certain extent, this moment symbolizes the entire history of 20th-century Spain and the transition from dictatorship to democracy. The Anatomy of a Moment describes the circumstances of the coup faithfully, drawing from dozens of hours of television footage from parliament, from court records with the coup plotters, and from the author's personal conversations with the participants in the events. The book...