Literary recommendation: ‘Let the stars be fire’, a historical novel that vindicates the desire for justice and freedom

By Freddy Aviles Zambrano | Historian

When you consult the history books, you feel a great frustration, because everything is reduced to a certain event, with a couple of heroes and a few lines to report, hence nothing more. I find myself reading Let the stars be fire of the authorship of the Mexican Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and It has managed to arouse my interest, a well-crafted and documented historical novel. The title of the narrative comes from a phrase taken from Hamlet, of Shakespeare and tells us the bustle of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement.

Taibo takes us to the city of Barcelona during the period 1917-1923, and tells us with an accelerated pulse and in the style of an agile chronicle of the confrontations between workers and employers and the struggle for union organization. In the The work parades a gallery of characters who are rescued from oblivion and who exemplify those stormy years of social struggle and who in each chapter show us that when crowds organize and rebel, power trembles.

Let the stars be fire is a beautiful story about the proletarian epic and that vindicates principles that even today in the XXI century they continue to be claimed and that they are the desire for justice and freedom. (O)