The breaking point

Stephen Koch in “Double Lives”, had already taken us into the fascinating plot of intrigues of “The Third Communist International ( Comintern)”. He told the story of the creation of anti-fascist fronts to disguise Stalin’s agenda to penetrate the universities and gain the French, English and American intellectuals alongside “to the cause of the peace and the poorest on earth” In this historical book, we see how the Cambridge circle is born, the lives of writers and spies will pass through its pages as spy’s movie.

With Double Lives, we also look at all the plots of the Soviets in the Spanish Civil War.

But Stephen Koch had a masterpiece in store for us, about the relationship between two great American writers: Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. How that friendship evolves until it breaks up, in the middle of the skein of intrigues and as a consequence of the murder and disappearance of the poet José Robles.

One of them, the adventurous writer on the spot in Madrid — presumptuous, partying and in permanent líos de faldas. The other writer increasingly isolated; disenchanted with communist utopia, relentlessly seeking answers on the disappearance of the Poet José Robles, his friend.

In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, we will read this historical narrative where we will witness the breaking point not only of friendship but of a dream that would become a nightmare for Dos Passos.

Along with Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn’s books (novels and essays) Svetlana Alexándrovna Alexiévich’s Chronicles and Padura’s “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” we could complete with Koch an accurate approximation of an evil machinery, which was not (and it is not) sufficiently denounced. An ideological communist machinery , which was treated with leniency after World War II , leaving the nazis as the only villains. Through the reading of those books, we will be able to recognize how the machinery act in disguised.