Waiting for Robert Capa: A Novel

by Susana Fortes

Overview

An extraordinary novel of love, war, and art, based on the turbulent real-life romance of legendary photojournalists Gerda Taro and Robert Capa

Artists, Jews, nonconformists, exiles. Gerta Pohorylle meets André Friedmann in Paris in 1935 and is drawn to his fierce dedication to justice, journalism, and the art of photography. Assuming new names, Gerda Taro and Robert Capa travel together to Spain, Europe’s most harrowing war zone, to document the rapidly intensifying turmoil of the Spanish Civil War. In the midst of the peril and chaos of brutal conflict, a romance for the ages is born, marked by passion and recklessness . . . until tragedy intervenes.

Already published to international acclaim, Waiting for Robert Capa is an exhilarating tale of art and love—and a moving tribute to all those who risk their lives to document the world’s violent transformations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062101600
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	211
Sales rank:	851,140
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Susana Fortes is a native of Spain. Her novels have been translated into almost twenty languages, and she is the winner of numerous literary awards, including the Premio Nuevos Narradores, the Premio Primavera, the Premio de la Crítica, and, for Waiting for Robert Capa, the Premio Fernando Lara. She is a regular contributor to El País as well as various cinema and literature magazines.

Susana Fortes es licenciada en Geografía e Historia. En 1994 ganó el Premio Nuevos Narradores con su primera novela, Querido Corto Maltés. Luego fue finalista del Premio Primavera 2001 con Fronteras de arena y finalista del Premio Planeta 2003 con El amante albanés, una novela que se convirtió en bestseller en España. La traducción en inglés, The Albanian Affairs, ha conseguido el tercer premio del Book of the Year Awards 2006. Sus obras han sido traducidas a diez idiomas. Actualmente vive en Valencia, donde compagina la enseñanza con el periodismo y la literatura.

Adriana Lopez was the founding editor of Críticas magazine, Publishers Weekly's Spanish-language sister publication. Lopez's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. A member of the PEN American Center, she lives in New York City.

What People are Saying About This

Jay Parini

“Waiting for Robert Capa moves artfully between fact and fiction, with a stunningly evoked backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Susana Fortes is the real thing: a world-class novelist who brings all of her considerable talents to bear on this brief, affecting story.”

Editorial Reviews

Arching between Paris before WWII and Spain in the midst of Civil War, Fortes’s (The Albanian Affairs) latest historical traces the rocky romance between the (real-life) talented, striking Polish refugee and activist Gerta Pohorylle and fellow Jewish émigré André Friedmann, otherwise known as Robert Capa. Though illuminating in its depiction of the conflicting artistic, social, and political currents rocking the Old Continent in the ’30s, the prose plods, with Fortes frequently resorting to name-dropping in lieu of narrative. Superficial descriptions of Paris cafes (“forums for heated debate” between usual suspects Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse, et al.) and the tendency for characters to enjoy “ferocious” lovemaking lend a tired, familiar feel. Gerta is “esolute, firm, bold” and boasts “the reddest lips in all of Paris.” And Capa “loved that skinny Jew.” While Fortes pays a well-deserved homage to Gerta and the exceptional women of the era, including “emale soldiers with black eyes and tawny leonine manes, a newspaper in one hand and a Mauser in the other,” her flowery prose is plagued by López’s strained, overly literal translation. Nevertheless, Gerta and Andre receive their just due with this thorough, if not exactly palpitating, portrayal. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Waiting for Robert Capa moves artfully between fact and fiction, with a stunningly evoked backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Susana Fortes is the real thing: a world-class novelist who brings all of her considerable talents to bear on this brief, affecting story.” — Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and The Passages of H.M.

From the Publisher

Waiting for Robert Capa moves artfully between fact and fiction, with a stunningly evoked backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Susana Fortes is the real thing: a world-class novelist who brings all of her considerable talents to bear on this brief, affecting story.

Jay Parini

Love and photography bring two young exiles together in this based-on-fact real-life tragic romance. When two young refugees meet in Paris in 1935, the world seems to be falling apart. Both Gerta Pohorylle and André Friedmann are Jews, exiles from the expanding Nazi regime (she is German, he Hungarian). Both are scraping by, enjoying a wild bohemian last gasp as the city fills with other penniless refugees and the native Parisians turn increasingly hostile, and their alliance is at first one of survival. She takes him on as a project, dressing him for success as a photojournalist. He, in turn, teaches her his art: " 'You have to be there,' he'd say, 'glued to your prey, lying in wait, in order to be able to shoot at the exact moment.' " They become lovers and adopt new names, and as Gerda Taro and Robert Capa travel to Spain to document what is becoming a brutal civil war. In that harsh land, they both blossom as artists and war journalists, their bohemian principles made flesh, before war catches up with them. In this short historical novel, Spanish novelist Fortes captures the complexity of pre–World War II Europe. Anarchists and Dadaists bond and then fall out, as various groups scramble for scraps and young people try to have fun. The personalities of the two main figures are fully imagined, rooted in existing biographical works, as are many of their peers. The burgeoning war also comes alive in poetic terms: "In the distance, Madrid was a white rabbit at the mercy of the hunting hounds." At times, however, the need to reassert the journalistic reality of these characters interferes, as awkward identifications disrupt the prose ("Gerda could still see the writer Gustav Regler's face as he was being carried out of the rubble"). Still, this vivid novel gives us a snapshot of a continent falling into chaos. Flawed but striking, this short novel shines a light on artists in times of love and war.

Kirkus Reviews