Non-Fiction Books
The music started: two guitarists beating out more Alboreás. The women took turns to dance in a frenzy, each trying to outdo the other. “Deep Song always sings in the night,” Lorca had written. It was the credo of the flamenco: a rejection of the mundane, the ordinary, the life of the everyday man, embracing, rather, an extreme world – extreme passions, extreme feelings, the extremes of life and death. And it was a way of life I wanted to believe in – its excitement, its danger, the affirmation it gave you that you were different, and alive. Destined for a sedate and predictable life in academia, Jason Webster was derailed in his early twenties when his first love, an aloof Florentine beauty, dumped him unceremoniously. Loveless and eager for adventure – and determined to fulfill a secret dream -- he left Oxford and headed for Spain, the country that had long captivated his imagination, and set off in search of duende , the intense and mysterious emotional state – part ecstasy, part melancholy – that is the essence of Spain’s signature art form: flamenco. Duende is Webster’s captivating memoir of the years he spent in Spain pursuing his obsession. Studying flamenco guitar until his fingers bleed, he becomes involved in a passionate yet doomed affair with Lola, a flamenco dancer (and older woman) married to the gun-toting Vicente, only to flee the coastal city of Alicante in fear for his life. He ends up in Madrid, miserable and lovelorn, but it’s here that he has his first taste of the gritty world of flamenco’s progenitors – the Gypsies whose edgy lives and fervent commitment to the art of flamenco vividly illustrate the path to duende . Before long he is deeply immersed in a flamenco underworld that combines music and dance with drugs and crime. After two years Webster moves on to Granada where, bruised and battered, he reflects on his discovery of the emotional heart of Spain.
Spain's Moorish past is evident everywhere you look. For centuries, Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in Spain side by side in peace, and it was home to some of the greatest minds in the world. After the Moors' expulsion in the seventeenth century, much of their knowledge, skill and artistry was lost. Jason Webster originally travelled to Spain to play the flamenco guitar. A qualified Arabist, he now embarks on a quest for Spain's forgotten Arab legacy, and gets embroiled with characters who are as wild and original as those he described so vividly in Duende. What lessons can we learn today from the harmony that existed for so long in medieval Spain - and from the subsequent expulsion of its Muslims and Jews?
As in his acclaimed Duende and Andalus, Jason Webster journeys across Spain, this time to explore the lasting effects of the Spanish Civil War. Could the divisions that led to the conflict still be simmering under the surface, and is it possible they could erupt again? From the Hardcover edition.
In a book, rich with characters and plants, this is a romantic and alluring leap into Spanish rural life with the author and his partner, a flamenco dancer, who buy a farm in a remote, steep valley and set about clearing land, planting and harvesting olives.
A controversial, urgent and new history of Spain from the best-selling interpreter of the country, Jason Webster. Spain's crises are deepening: Catalans struggle for independence, political parties push to the extremes, and the dead call restlessly to the living. Will the country follow the example of its history by resolving its problems once again through violence? Spain is often overlooked as a mere tourist destination. Yet we ignore events there at our peril, for a long view of the country's history reveals how it has shaped the Western world by presaging everything from the Crusades to the European Renaissance, Western colonialism, the Second World War and the Cold War. This truth has never before been grasped, however, because Spain is a Cassandra country. As with Troy's prophetess, so Spain's prescience is doomed to be ignored - not only by her neighbours, but also by her own people. Today, Spain has returned to the headlines because she is once again caught in an ancient pattern of deciding through civil conflict whether to remain united or splinter into many parts. We speak of the Spanish Civil War as if there had only ever been one, yet every century in Spanish history has seen bloody engagement, each time over intractable questions about national identity. Can the twenty-first century prove any different? And how will developments in Spain echo in the rest of the Western world? Jason Webster has a deep knowledge of Spain from the inside. Violencia tells the colourful and highly engaging story of the country from its very beginnings to the present day by combining decades of research with personal anecdote. The book uncovers for the first time not only underlying shapes of Spanish history which are in danger of being repeated, but also the previously unacknowledged fact that events in the country have long predicted developments in the West. It is a must read for anyone wishing to understand Spain, and a complex and changing world.
Max Cámara is back! Valencia’s most famous police detective makes a long-awaited reappearance in this celebration of his life, his work, and the city he strives to protect. In a collection of articles, essays and an interview with Max himself, this first volume of Jason Webster’s new series, Mosaics of Spain, takes us deep into Spanish crime - and one man’s unorthodox ways of fighting it.Including a profile of the head of the Valencia Police murder squad, a photo gallery, and thoughts on the psychology of detective fiction, The World of Max Cámara is a companion guide, an introduction and also a taster of future novels in the series to come.Those who thought the chief inspector had worked his last case were wrong, and he’s here to prove it. As the Spanish proverb says, 'Mala hierba nunca muere' - You can’t keep ‘a bad man’ down…