[Juan Benet, in his novel Saúl ante Samuel,] repeats his standard themes of ruin, disintegration, solitude, guilt, time, life, and death involving the Spanish Civil War and his mythical Región. In the author's examination of the State, revenge, and avarice as exemplified by the various characters, he seems to conclude that no answers exist for their multiple human motivations and concomitant problems.
The author deliberately obfuscates the slowly developing plot. The novel opens in an abandoned house where a solitary figure has been waiting twenty years for the return of a traveler fixed and frozen in time by the memory of events. The scene shifts to that past and to a Republican convoy, one of whose officers is the younger son of the owner of the house, asked by his father to take on a Republican role to protect his family, Nationalist supporters, from the consequences of their political beliefs. The convoy, on its way to Región, is held up by an accident and various war strategies. The older brother's wife has an adulterous affair with her brother-in-law. After a suspenseful delay and disquisitions on the meaning of guilt and responsibility, we learn of the older brother's execution, the death of the younger brother, and the death or disappearance of all the other principal actors, except for the solitary survivor in the ruined and abandoned home. Acting as biographer, a cousin, also in love with the adulteress, plays out his tragic role. Indeed, as the fortune-telling cards of the grandmother convey, all of the protagonists, the jealous unloved young brother, the incompetent father, the arrogant older brother, are actors in a tragic play, serving at the same time as symbolic multiple representations of a decadent Spain.
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