París, 1935. Escritores, pintores, poetas, fotógrafos… se mezclan en las calles y en los cafés de la Rive Gauche con miles de refugiados que llegan huyendo del nazismo. Entre ellos, dos jóvenes judíos. Ella, alemana de origen polaco, orgullosa, disciplinada y audaz. Él, húngaro, un superviviente nato que intenta como puede hacerse un hueco en el mundo de la fotografía. En apenas un año, el estallido de la guerra civil española los convertirá en dos de los mejores reporteros de guerra de todos los tiempos: Robert Capa y Gerda Taro. El amor, la guerra y la fotografía marcaron sus vidas. Eran jóvenes, antifascistas, guapos y asilvestrados. Lo tenían todo. Y lo arriesgaron todo. Crearon su propia leyenda y fueron fieles a ella hasta sus últimas consecuencias. Una novela emocionante que rinde homenaje a todos los periodistas y fotógrafos que se dejan la vida en el ejercicio de su profesión para mostrarnos cómo amanece el mundo cada día.

Heillandi söguleg frásaga af ævi tveggja landflótta gyðinga Gertu Pohorylle og André Friedmanns sem hittast á fjórða áratugnum í París. Þau verða ástfangin af hvort öðru og einnig af ljósmyndun sem verður ekki bara lífsviðurværi þeirra heldur ástríða. Þau hata fasisma og eru miklir vinstri menn og því halda þau til Spánar þegar borgarastyrjöldin hefst, fyrst sem stríðsfréttaritarar en taka síðar æ meiri þátt í stríðinu sjálfu vegna hugsjóna sinna. Þau sýna æ meiri dirfsku og hugrekki vegna ástríðu sinnar og eiga síðar eftir að gjalda þess dýru verði.
Gerta og André skapa persónurnar Robert Capa og Gerdu Taro sem eru frægir ljósmyndarar og kría þannig út aukaaura en verða síðar fræg undir þeim nöfnum. Í borgarastríðinu tók Capa síðan frægustu stríðsfréttaljósmynd allra tíma, af óþekkta hermanninum um leið og hann er skotinn. Myndin sem gerði Capa heimsfrægan en eyðilagði sálarró hans líkt og fór fyrir svo mörgum fréttaljósmyndurum sem mynduðu hörmungar.
Þetta er ástar- og harmsaga sem lýsir vel þroska þeirra Capa og Taros sem fréttaljósmyndara og Fortes tekur fram að allar myndir og viðburðir sem koma við sögu í borgarastyrjöldinni eru byggðir á staðreyndum. ( )

Average

I was aware of Capa before reading the book, but didn’t know much about the story. The book starts in mid-30’s Paris when Endre Friedmann (Robert Capa) meets Gerta Pohorylle (Gerda Taro) and Gerta agrees to be Friedmann’s manager. After a distasteful stint as photographer to a German paper (both Friedmann and Pohorylle are Jews) in Spain Friedmann returns to Paris and the two start an affair. When Gerta realizes that Friedmann would have more luck as an “American” photographer they both change their names. They then both go to cover the Spanish civil war where Taro, the first woman war photojournalist, loses her life. Fortes states at the beginning of the book that Spain owes Capa a book and this is it, originally written in Spanish. I don’t know if it was the translation, or if the original book had the same problem, but the writing is alternatively grandiose and banal, the characters fail to come to life and I wasn’t overjoyed to find it was a historical romance with many sex scenes. In the end this book just wasn’t for me, there is a great story here, Capa’s life and Taro’s life are fascinating and so is the historical period. Fortes sadly isn’t a good enough writer to bring it alive though.

More info on Capa here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Capa and Taro here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerda_Taro which will tell you much more than reading this book

Overall – disappointing and boring ( )

Shamefully, I had no idea who Robert Capa and Gerda Taro were when I started this book, but I now feel possessive and proud and affectionate toward Gerda Taro and I dare anyone to read this and not feel the same. In 1935, Jewish refugees Gerda Pohorylle and André Friedmann meet in Paris; André is a photographer who books Gerda's friend as a model for advertising images. Gerda becomes interested in the art of photography; her friend predicts a romance.

The novel is told through Gerda Pohorylle (mostly; the POV does shift to André/Capa at times, usually during sex) -- who later renames herself Gerda Taro -- but the story is really about the creation of Robert Capa and André's genius, temper, and passion. Robert Capa is an assumed name, created by Gerda as a way for she and André to make more money from his (and occasionally her) photographs.

I was pretty apprehensive about this one since a number of bloggers I trust didn't like this book, but once I started, I was surprised. I was immediately sucked in by the story -- Gerda is an amazing figure, and while I don't understand the appeal of André/Capa, I liked the way Fortes unfolded their romance and Gerda's education in photography. I was quite taken with the language and turn-of-phrase (like this, from page 3: "She preferred English poetry a million times over. One poem by Eliot can free you from evil, she thought. God didn't even help me escape that Wachterstrasse prison." Or this one, from page 6: "If sound waves travel through the ether, then somewhere in the galaxy there must also be the Psalms, litanies, and prayers of men floating within the stars.") and so I was surprised by the critiques that the writing/translation was problematic.

And then, I started to notice the weird grammar/punctuation issues. I'm not spectacular with grammar, yet I found now and then some really atrocious sentences and punctuation gaffes. Perhaps the result of my reading an uncorrected proof; perhaps this is a bad translation. Maybe something else entirely. But it didn't bother me enough to leave this book unfinished, and I think there is some really gorgeous language here and a heartbreaking, moving story. This is one that will stick with me (I'm still sighing over it to friends and colleagues) and I have no doubt this will be a frequent reread for me. ( )

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 corrected before publication.] ( )