Titre : Of silence and gold
Auteur.ice : IVAN BUTEL
Edition: Globe
Date of publication: January 09, 2025
Like book: Documentary novel
Of silence and gold follows the tribulations of Ivan Butel, screenwriter and director of documentaries, party in search of … cha. Cha? This man who won many gold medals during the Paralympic Olympics for the Spanish nation, in the early 2000s and who on the return plane of Sydney, discovered that his past had resurfaced in the press: he had been a Terrorist from the far left, having made prison for having been co-responsible for the death of a man, shot dead. What to do with that past?
It is a long -term investigation that this silence and gold, the author having contacted Cha from the early 2000s. Besides, most of the novel details the events that took place until Jo of 2008. The second part is faster, on what is going on after 2008, until today. The writer wanted to know who this man was, how did he live this permanent return of this indelible past, and if he felt remorse for his actions.
Cha is not an isolated man, a lone wolf. This is what makes this work fascinating, the way in which Francoism is told there but especially after Franco, in 1975, when Spain slowly democratized while explicitly asking its population and in the country not to Too much stirring the shit of the past: stay silent, on the thousands of murders and assassinations, pardon criminals, and simply transform the French police into police from the new Spanish democracy. Faced with this, terrorist movements (described as terrorists) began to organize themselves to kill: killing police officers or people considered to be “eliminating”.
Cha is a man born in a worker family of Vigo, a city in the northwest Spanish swept by the winds, vsous an almost permanent spit, which the author manages to transcribe. By following Cha in his daily life as a future Paralympic athlete, seller of lottery tickets in coffees, he wonders not only about a city but about an entire country which holds (or only holds) on a law of silence.
-Cha has entered the movement, according to his brother. He did prison. It was there that he lost the use of his legs, following a hunger strike of more than 400 days. There will be a before and after, not only the prison, but this hunger strike. A valid man enters there and a handicapped man comes out, someone who no longer wishes to even talk about his past activities, once the body plunged in water to swim, swim and swim yet.
Ivan Butel therefore follows Cha, asking her while trying to keep his right place, becomes a friend, a confidant. He writes in a very simple way, right to goal, without frills, while going beyond basic journalistic writing. His descriptions are well imagined, the story clear. From the moment when the medals wins, and the author puts his story a quick time, we could start to fear a certain lack of distance from his subject. How indeed to deal with terrorism by becoming friends with the subject of his documentary?
However, Ivan Butel asks the questions that hurt and wonders: how to forgive a man who killed, with other men, with composure, a boss of a company in his thirties, father of two children? When is the debt to society? Is extreme left terrorism excusable than another? What place to give to a former murderer, violently against the action of the state, now rented by the political heralds of his city, Vigo? Isn’t the right to a second life, to another life, without its turbulent past? These are all these questions that Ivan Butel ask us that stir.
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