Review of Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes

Translation by Adriana V. Lopez

Waiting for Robert Capa is both a puzzling book and an alluring one. It contains gorgeous, vivid descriptions of life in Paris and Spain in the ‘30s. It has long philosophical musings on war and refugees and love and memory, which I found deeply compelling and thought provoking. The portrayal of the Spanish Civil War with its intellectuals and artists as well as its armies was tragic and moving. What I was never persuaded of was that this is a novel rather than a strange hybrid of history, biography, artistic critique, with more imagined pieces to it than any of those writing forms generally permit. This doesn’t make it a bad book, just an unusual one.

We never lose ourselves in Fortes’s imagined semi-fictional world because she tells Robert and Gerda’s story with the all-knowing voice of historical retrospective. It’s not just an omniscient point of view; it’s the voice of history and critique. The book has poetic, involving descriptions, but then there are also moments of narrative disconnect when Fortes has positioned the point of view inside Gerda’s mind and yet somehow future events are known and described. Here’s a passage when Gerda and Capa have recently arrived in Spain that demonstrates both the book’s beauty and its odd narrative voice:

“Gerda and Capa spoke little during those walks. As if each needed to react on their own while facing that land inhabited with skinny dogs and old women dressed in black, their faces chiseled by strong winds, weaving wicker baskets under the shade of a fig tree. She began to realize that perhaps the real face of the war wasn’t just the price paid for the blood and disemboweled bodies that she would soon see, but the bitter wisdom that lived in those women’s eyes, a dog’s solitude as it wandered through the fields limping, a hind leg broken by a bullet.”

Sometimes Fortes’s writing seems more a critique or homage to these two photographers than a novel. For example:

“She was training her photographer’s eye, and little by little, she was developing an extraordinary talent for observation. Curious, she lifted the tip of the cloth with caution and discovered the dead body of a few-months-old baby dressed in a white shirt with lace trimming, whose parents were planning to bury their child that very afternoon. She kept quiet, but went out walking by herself until she reached the edge of an embankment and sat down. Resting her head on her knees, she began to cry, hard and long, with tears that dripped onto her pants, unable to control herself, without really knowing why she was crying, completely alone, staring out into that horizon of yellow countryside. She had just learned her first important lesson as a journalist. No scenery could ever be as devastating as a human story. This would be her photography’s signature. The snapshots she captured with her camera those days were not the images of war that militant magazines such as Vu or Regards awaited. But those slightly inclined frames transmitted a greater sense of sadness and loneliness than the war itself.”

In this passage Fortes starts with a scene, although even here her narrative voice creates a kind of distance between the reader and the character/experience depicted in the scene. But after starting in-scene, she shifts to a description of her journalism—the narrative camera moves outward away from the fictional world into the art critic’s academic voice. Both Capa and Gerda were talented and fascinating photographers. Learning about them was one of the pleasures of this book, and perhaps there was no way to accomplish that without leaving pure story-telling behind, but generally speaking, I prefer historical fiction to pull me more directly into another world and let me forget the academic structures of history and analysis while I’m there.

One other mildly distressing aspect of this book—and it may have come about in the process of translation—is the constant use of sentence fragments, whole paragraphs of them at times. The feeling of an incomplete idea, an unexpressed point begins to creep up on my consciousness as I read these bits and pieces of phrases with no grammatical or logical completion. It’s a stylistic choice, I think, but it may be one tinged with some intellectual laziness. The writer needs to think the idea all the way through and push the heart and mind to the end. It’s painful, but that’s what writing is. Others may feel she’s captured an appropriate mood or flood of emotions with this choice, and I’m just being a stodgy old English teacher, with which I won’t quarrel.

The relationship Fortes describes between Capa and Gerda is complex and multi-faceted. She gives us a weighty, layered portrayal of their lives. The horrors of the civil war are vividly depicted. She gives us the warmth and depth of the many friendships Capa and Gerda had with other photographers, journalists, doctors, and refugees.

There are many reasons to read Waiting For Capa, but don’t expect to get lost in a rich fictional world. The rich world is there and so is the fiction, but the author is at your side commenting throughout. You will not get lost and that might be a loss.

[Please note that I was reading an unedited electronic advance reader copy and there may be errors in the passages I have quoted that will be emended before publication.]