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20 November marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of General Franco And while the insurrectionist’s victory in the Spanish Civil War paved the way for a 36-year dictatorship – as resilient as it was anachronistic – the country’s Transition to democracy is traditionally seen as exemplary The attempted coup of 1981 was a potentially lethal threat to Europeanisation, averted through the fortitude and quick thinking of King Juan Carlos, who steered the country towards a stable monarchical democracy, built on the bedrock of barring memories of the past from dictating the future At least that is what young Spaniards were brought up to believe The general elections to be held on 20 December are the most unpredictable and politically volatile since 1979; this is both a symptom and cause of the crisis in a once widely accepted narrative   Conflicting accounts of what actually happened during the Civil War and the dictatorship are increasingly compounded through bitter debates over the ethics and pragmatism of what predicated the 1978 Constitution That is, collective amnesty (some would say amnesia) coupled with market capitalism The architects of the new state now stand accused of privileging politics over justice and equality, not only silencing the crimes of the past but preserving the interests of pre-existing elites who many believe must be held accountable for Spain’s current crises   Javier Cercas, arguably Spain’s greatest living novelist, is the subject of both critical veneration and opprobrium for his work, best-selling ruminations on this very history, a meld of fact and fiction – the Civil War in Soldiers of Salamis (2001), the coup attempt in The Anatomy of a Moment (2009) Amongst his many accolades figure Spain’s National Book Award, the Independent’s Foreign Literature Prize, and taking up the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship at Oxford this year, a post previously held by George Steiner, Umberto Eco and Mario Vargas Llosa For his admirers, Cercas combines the talents of a historian with that of a writer, producing works whose broad formal, socio-historical and linguistic canvases bear comparison with Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero (1963) and The Feast of the Goat