The new Javier Cercas book

The new Cercas book is El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo. That title translates roughly as “The crazy man of God at the end of the world,” noting there are ambiguities in who that man is (Cercas? The Pope?), and whether the end of the world refers to a trip to Mongolia or the apocalypse or perhaps death.

Cercas, arguably Spain’s greatest living writer, decides to shed his purely secular perspective and accompany Pope Francis on his Mongolia visit, a country with about 1500 Catholics. Like many of Cercas’s novels, it is a mix of non-fiction and fiction, and it is also self-consciously a detective story – which truths will Cercas unlock during this journey? Most of all, he wants to know if his mother will meet her husband (Cercas’s father) when she dies.

We live in a time when an atheistic European author puts down his preoccupation with Spanish history and spends almost five hundred pages engaging with the Pope and also the possibility of God. A vibe shift if there ever was one.

Cercas reports that he came away from the trip more anti-clerical than before, but on the matter of God and the miracle of the Resurrection, I read his text as ever so ambiguous.

Do not despair, the works of Cercas usually end up translated into English in a reasonably prompt manner.