The New York Times Book Review - Amanda Vaill
"The Poet Tells the Truth" is a famous poem by Federico García Lorca, but what if the poet doesn't? What kind of poetry can you write if everything about you is a lie? That's the question at the heart of The Age of Disenchantments, Aaron Shulman's intriguing narrative of literary ambition and family dysfunction—betrayal, drug addiction and madness—that begins during the Spanish Civil War and continues into this century.
Publishers Weekly
★ 11/19/2018
In this sweeping, ambitious debut, journalist Shulman offers a group biography of a family indelibly marked by the Spanish Civil War. He begins with the family’s patriarch, Leopoldo Panero, a noted poet who abandoned the left-wing Republicans to defect to the right-wing Nationalists during the war, eventually rising high in General Franco’s regime to assume the role of unofficial poet laureate. Shulman also profiles in depth Leopoldo’s wife, Felicidad, who endured their troubled marriage—despite proclaiming that “family is sacred!” Leopoldo had many affairs—through an intense, albeit platonic, relationship with another poet. Of their three sons, the oldest, Juan Luis, sought, with limited success, to assume his father’s role after Leopoldo died in 1962; the middle son, Leopoldo Maria, was arrested after urging people not to vote in a pro-Franco referendum in 1967 and later attempted suicide; while the youngest, Michi, suffered from mental illness. In 1976, the year after Franco’s death, a documentary, The Disenchantment, depicted the surviving Paneros grappling with Leopoldo’s legacy; a viewing of the film inspired Shulman to write this book. Prodigiously researched and beautifully written, Shulman’s work reveals a remarkable family of “refreshing weirdness, poetic obsessions, and sacrilegious taste for destruction” as a microcosm of Spain’s tortured 20th century. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
A fascinating account...In Shulman’s hands, the story of the gifted, doomed Paneros becomes an absorbing rumination on loyalty and betrayal, history and myth, literature and pretense, on the nature of family, and of memory itself. A remarkable book, and a compulsive read.” — Jon Lee Anderson, author of The Fall of Baghdad and Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
“In this sweeping, ambitious debut, journalist Shulman offers a group biography of a family indelibly marked by the Spanish Civil War…Prodigiously researched and beautifully written…” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Betrayal and sacrifice, passion and poetry, the fate of a country if not a continent, epic destruction—all is in play in this sweeping yet intimate account. Yet what makes this book so truly rich and resonant is Shulman’s ability to expose the core humanity that underlies the entire saga.” — Mark Eisner, author of Neruda: The Biography of a Poet
“A deeply researched portrait...Spain’s roiling history, beginning in the 1930s, forms the backdrop to the family’s turmoil. A richly detailed history.” — Kirkus Reviews
“At its heart, this book is about the soul of Spain. The lives of the Paneros—poets, writers, brothers, lovers, and rivals—roiled and rhymed with the revolutions and counterrevolutions of a nation in search of itself. As richly and intimately drawn as the characters might have drawn themselves.” — Joe Hagan, author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
“[Shulman] revives the complex, passionate, and faded, Grey Gardens–like landscape of the Spanish past, and, thanks to his deep love for Spain, readers will be enchanted with the journeys he shares.” — Soledad Fox Maura, professor of Spanish and comparative literature, Williams College, and author of Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy: Jorge Semprún
“A mythic saga of artists passionately believing that they were shaping the world only to be utterly re-made by it. Read The Age of Disenchantments now before we are all binge-watching it on Netflix.” — Jack Hitt, author of Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain
“[An] intriguing narrative of literary ambition and family dysfunction—betrayal, drug addiction and madness—that begins during the Spanish Civil War and continues into this century.” — New York Times Book Review
“This book adds to a smaller body of literature on the intellectuals who chose survival over principles...Examining Panero’s output and his relationships, Shulman reconstructs the arc of a man who saw literature as both craft and escape.” — New Yorker
“[A] brilliant biography of the outlandish Panero family.” — National Book Review
“...Part biography, part political history...A portrait of an earlier Spain...when poets were widely loved and celebrated and as a young visitor to the Paneros’ house put it, ‘all the young people were drunk with hope and poetry.” — Wall Street Journal
“Shulman’s narrative blends the personal and the political, and raises timely questions...The Age of Disenchantments has something important to show us about the urgency of history and our agency within it.” — Los Angeles Book Review
“The book reads as so many squiggling lines of startling connections, a grave revisiting of the horrors of the [Spanish] Civil War, and as genuine wonder and appreciation for a singular family. The way the Paneros moved, changed, decayed, and ended is astonishing.” — Full Stop
“Part history, part melodrama, and sure to entertain public library patrons attracted to family biographies or Spain.” — Library Journal
“Shulman is able to bring to life the Panero family’s heartache and the Spanish Civil War’s devastation as only a trained journalist can... The resulting work avoids a dry historical retelling of the War, instead, weaving a narrative story that piques even non-historians’ interest.” — San Francisco Book Review
Jon Lee Anderson
A fascinating account...In Shulman’s hands, the story of the gifted, doomed Paneros becomes an absorbing rumination on loyalty and betrayal, history and myth, literature and pretense, on the nature of family, and of memory itself. A remarkable book, and a compulsive read.
Jack Hitt
A mythic saga of artists passionately believing that they were shaping the world only to be utterly re-made by it. Read The Age of Disenchantments now before we are all binge-watching it on Netflix.
Soledad Fox Maura
[Shulman] revives the complex, passionate, and faded, Grey Gardens–like landscape of the Spanish past, and, thanks to his deep love for Spain, readers will be enchanted with the journeys he shares.
National Book Review
[A] brilliant biography of the outlandish Panero family.”
New Yorker
This book adds to a smaller body of literature on the intellectuals who chose survival over principles...Examining Panero’s output and his relationships, Shulman reconstructs the arc of a man who saw literature as both craft and escape.”
Mark Eisner
Betrayal and sacrifice, passion and poetry, the fate of a country if not a continent, epic destruction—all is in play in this sweeping yet intimate account. Yet what makes this book so truly rich and resonant is Shulman’s ability to expose the core humanity that underlies the entire saga.
Joe Hagan
At its heart, this book is about the soul of Spain. The lives of the Paneros—poets, writers, brothers, lovers, and rivals—roiled and rhymed with the revolutions and counterrevolutions of a nation in search of itself. As richly and intimately drawn as the characters might have drawn themselves.
New York Times Book Review
[An] intriguing narrative of literary ambition and family dysfunction—betrayal, drug addiction and madness—that begins during the Spanish Civil War and continues into this century.”
New Yorker
This book adds to a smaller body of literature on the intellectuals who chose survival over principles...Examining Panero’s output and his relationships, Shulman reconstructs the arc of a man who saw literature as both craft and escape.”
Full Stop
The book reads as so many squiggling lines of startling connections, a grave revisiting of the horrors of the [Spanish] Civil War, and as genuine wonder and appreciation for a singular family. The way the Paneros moved, changed, decayed, and ended is astonishing.”
Los Angeles Book Review
Shulman’s narrative blends the personal and the political, and raises timely questions...The Age of Disenchantments has something important to show us about the urgency of history and our agency within it.”
San Francisco Book Review
Shulman is able to bring to life the Panero family’s heartache and the Spanish Civil War’s devastation as only a trained journalist can... The resulting work avoids a dry historical retelling of the War, instead, weaving a narrative story that piques even non-historians’ interest.”
Wall Street Journal
...Part biography, part political history...A portrait of an earlier Spain...when poets were widely loved and celebrated and as a young visitor to the Paneros’ house put it, ‘all the young people were drunk with hope and poetry.
Wall Street Journal
...Part biography, part political history...A portrait of an earlier Spain...when poets were widely loved and celebrated and as a young visitor to the Paneros’ house put it, ‘all the young people were drunk with hope and poetry.
Kirkus Reviews
2018-12-03
A prominent literary family reflects Spain's tumultuous past.
Making his book debut, journalist Shulman creates a deeply researched portrait of the Paneros, one of Spain's most notorious families: patriarch Leopoldo (1909-1962), a well-regarded poet during the Franco dictatorship; his unhappy wife, Felicidad; and his three tormented sons. The author's fascination with the family began in 2012, when he watched El desencanto, a documentary made in 1976, in which Felicidad and her adult sons spoke candidly about their relationships with Leopoldo and one another, revealing anger, bitterness, and loneliness. The movie elevated the Paneros "into a cultural phenomenon," Shulman writes, and sparked his own interest in the family's "refreshing weirdness, poetic obsessions, and sacrilegious taste for destruction." He is not alone in responding to their "lasting magnetism." They have inspired academic studies, fiction, poetry, songs, films, memoirs, volumes of correspondence, and republication of their own works—"a literary subgenre unto themselves." Central to the family's story is the question of Leopoldo's commitment to fascism. Like others of his generation, he chose "survival over principles" in supporting Franco, "warts and all." As a well-respected poet, he knew that Spain needed cultured men "to burnish the country's reputation—and to defend it, a cause he assiduously took up." He served as a censor, took a diplomatic post in London (where he befriended T.S. Eliot), directed a government-sponsored literary magazine, convened literary conferences, and became editorial director of the Spanish Reader's Digest. If his political stance enraged the likes of Pablo Neruda, who attacked him as "a Francoist executioner," in Spain his reputation flourished. A success professionally, his personal life was a mess. He was, Shulman reveals, "a cryptic, complicated, and often difficult man, and his personality and the power he wielded over his family left a profound mark on his wife and children." Felicidad felt unloved and oppressed; his sons, beset by their own demons, failed to achieve the literary success to which they aspired. Spain's roiling history, beginning in the 1930s, forms the backdrop to the family's turmoil.
A richly detailed history chronicles a family's pain.
