Vingt ans et un jour

The last novel Jorge Semprún published during his lifetime, Vingt ans et un jour takes as its starting point a tragic event: the murder of a young landowner by his servants during the Spanish Civil War. Each year, his family reenacts the scene of the crime as an expiatory ceremony, a theater of memory that is both intimate and political.

Semprún explains that he heard this story from a close friend, Domingo Dominguín, a celebrated bullfighter, whom he met at a lunch in Madrid in the presence of Ernest Hemingway — a scene reproduced as such in the novel. From it, the author drew a fiction in which Francoist Spain becomes the setting for a meditation on collective guilt and the possibility of forgiveness.