The Times Literary Supplement
"Fox Maura lays out her questions from the start: "What was it that really led [Semprún] to join the Resistance? How much are his books based on personal memories, or on second-hand information about the Nazi concentration camps? Where does he stand within Holocaust culture, as a non-Jew and as a writer whose testimony is highly fictionalized? Fox Maura's treatment of all this is entertaining, fast-paced, and fully informed"
Los Angeles Review of Books
"Engaging . . . Fox Maura's impeccable biography expertly dissects the complex nuances of Semprún's work and experiences, doing justice to a singular life"
Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
"After reading this lively and intriguing biography, I'm amazed that most of us know so little about Jorge Semprún, even though we've likely seen films that he inspired or wrote. This man of great zest, talent, and courage who played so many roles in the crises of his time—underground resister, novelist, cabinet minister and more—reminds me of no one so much as André Malraux. It's a pleasure to have his remarkable life now available to us in English."
Jonathan Blitzer, writer for The New Yorker
"Jorge Semprún packed four or five lives into one. Artist, prisoner, freedom fighter, diplomat, organizer—in his eighty-seven years he quite literally embodied the story of a whole continent. Soledad Fox's superb biography tells his story with clarity, grace, and high style, just as Semprún lived. This is an essential book, biography and history told with novelistic precision."
Alan Riding, author of And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris
"In this fascinating biography, Soledad Fox demonstrates how Semprún's many lives not only fueled his writing, but also freed him to reinvent them as "auto-fiction." No less important, Fox throws the spotlight on a man little known in the English-speaking world whose extraordinary life and literature mirror the multiple traumas of Europe's 20th century."
Alternativas Económicas
"With the precision of a surgeon, Soledad Fox Maura . . . brings to life the voice of the unforgettable author of Le grand voyage, and former Minister of Culture."
La Revista
"At last we have the long-overdue story of his life for the English-language reader, in Soledad Fox Maura’s authoritative biography."
Le Monde
"In her classic and meticulous investigation of the Spanish writer who used his own life as his subject matter, Fox explores, unravels, and brilliantly sorts out the life lived from the imaginary one."
L'Humanité
"Exploring never seen archives, Fox has succesfully produced a much need substantial biography of the writer who transformed his own life into literature and film, convinced that auto-fiction was the only way to give voice to true testimony."
Gijs van Hensbergen author of Gaudi: The Biography and Guernica: The Biography of a 20th Century Icon
"Soledad Fox Maura's portrait of Jorge Semprún is a brilliant dissection of one of the 20th century's most fascinating characters. Through the smoke and mirrors of Semprún's obsessive self invention, Fox Maura brings her judicious eye to bear down on the great chameleon, one-time Communist, aristocrat, Buchenwald survivor, best-selling novelist, Lothario, spy, and Spain's Minister of Culture . . . totally engrossing!"
Duncan Wheeler, Professor of Spanish Studies at the University of Leeds
"I devoured this immensely readable book from start to finish on a single bus journey from Madrid to Zamora, and learned more than I have during far more labour-intensive days in the library."
El Mundo
"The most complete possible portrait of an intense and complex life, a voyage through the 20th century seen through the eyes of one of Spain's most internationally relevant and well-known intellectuals."
Interviú
"This is a very well written biography, thoroughly researched, and both passionate and dispassionate at the same time. Highly recommended."
La Razón
"Soledad Fox Maura's biography sheds light on the darker corners of this intellectual's life, and puts words where there was only silence."
Livres
"The only missing element for Semprun-the autobiographer, the acclaimed script-writer who managed to stage his own legend through his films, was a real biography. Fox's work beautifully describes Semprun's rich and multilayered life."
Marianne
"Soledad Fox has written the fascinating biography of a public man who was as iconoclastic as he was enigmatic."
Some Reviews
"An intimate yet succinctly sweeping story about the distant aftershocks of the defining event in 20th century Spain, [Madrid Again] adds up to a subtle and shimmering novel about searching – for identity, for secrets, and ultimately for home. Madrid Again is a book as American as it is Spanish. An immigrant story about finding belonging between two cultures, and a postwar story about communing with the ghosts of history."
— Spain in English
“What does it mean to belong (but not entirely) to two completely different countries and cultures? In her debut novel, Soledad Fox Maura creates an indelible portrait of exile, longing, identity, and of one woman’s search for her essence amid the scraps and fables of the past. Madrid Again is a knockout—spare, lyrical, sexy, and haunting.”
— Peter Smith, author of A Good Family
Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy: The Life of Jorge Semprún
A man of many faces, Jorge Semprún perfectly personified the struggles and successes of twentieth-century Europe. Semprún enjoyed a privileged childhood as the grandson of Spanish prime minister, Antonio Maura, until his world was shattered by the political strife of the Spanish Civil War and he went into exile. Facing dangers rarely seen outside the action movies of Hollywood, Semprún adopted a resilient spirit and rebel’s stance. He fought with the French Resistance in World War II.
A Spanish Woman in Love and War: Constancia del la Mora
By addressing the political and sociological meanings of Constancia de la Mora’s communism, the author opens up further audiences among historians of twentieth-century Spain while her exploration of how, why and with what consequences de la Mora then concealed this allegiance embeds her story in the domestic political history of twentieth-century America with its central mobilising narrative of anticommunism. Professor Helen Graham, Dept. of History, Royal Holloway, University of London
Flaubert and Don Quijote: The Influence of Cervantes on Madame Bovary
Flaubert used Cervantes' great novel as a model in his attempt to renew literature, to liberate him from the grasp of dominant literary schools. But the significance of Mauras's study goes far beyond a detailed analysis of a single case in the history of literature. It is a 'comparative' study in the deepest sense of this term. The book shows how the discontent with actual literature in both cases of Cervantes and Flaubert leads first of all toward an ironic parody, distantiation from the dominant trends and later to radically new forms of artistic consciousness...
Ida y vuelta. La vida de Jorge Semprún
The definitive biography of Jorge Semprún, a legendary character who crossed the Spanish and European twentieth century in the front line.
The life of Jorge Semprún is practically the history of Europe in the 20th century, and perhaps he is the Spaniard who comes closest to "the uprooted travelers of the century", as Tony Judt described intellectuals. Undoubtedly, together with Picasso and García Lorca, he is the Spaniard of the 20th century with the greatest projection and international relevance.
Jorge Semprún - L'écriture et la vie
La vie de Jorge Semprún reflète presque tous les épisodes de l'histoire de l'Europe au XXe siècle. Depuis sa naissance, en 1923, dans une famille de la grande bourgeoisie madrilène, en passant par le traumatisme de la Guerre civile et de l'exil, jusqu'au maquis et à la déportation au camp de Buchenwald, sans oublier l'aventure communiste, Jorge Semprún a tous les traits des «voyageurs déracinés» des grands intellectuels du siècle, selon l'expression de l'historien Tony Judt.
Connie: Biografia de Constancia de la Mora
Biography of Constancia de la Mora, aristocrat and republican
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Constancia de la Mora is one of the most paradoxical and enigmatic Spanish figures of the 1930s.Born into a privileged and conservative environment, destined to marry well, have children and be part of the elite of "old Spain", she broke with the canons of the time by becoming a militant Republican, getting divorced, and sending her only daughter to the Soviet Union.