Victus

Victus, the fall of Barcelona, is a historical novel by the Catalan anthropologist Albert Sánchez Piñol published by HarperCollins in September 2014. It is based in the fictitious biography of the Lieutenant Colonel Marti Zuviria who, being 98, tells from Vienna his memories as an engineer serving the commander Antoni de Villarroel during the War of the Spanish Succession, especially during the Siege of Barcelona.

Cover of English-language edition

The book was written originally in Spanish, but was quickly translated into Catalan and many other languages, including English. Since its original publication on October 2012, the book has sold more than 200,000 copies either in Catalan or Spanish, and the rights of translation have been sold for the book to be translated into Russian, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, French, Korean, and Croatian. In 2015, the author published the novel's sequel, Vae Victus [1]

Controversy

On September the 4, 2014, the book's launch ceremony in Utrecht was cancelled because of pressures coming from the Spanish Embassy in the Netherlands, who declared the ceremony as "sensitive for the political moment" and blamed the book for "historical distortion" in favour of the independentist Catalonian movement.[2][3] Juliette van Wersch, the Dutch editor of Victus, described the fact as censorship, but avoiding any comment about the alleged historical distortion.[4]

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gollark: Markets seem to be the best way around to allocate most resources right now, as long as they're managed reasonably. The alternatives people have seem to generally involve either centrally planning stuff, which is maybe computationally hard and has bad incentives, having some communal system and hoping people get along, which doesn't scale, or voting on things, which has the central planning issues plus exciting new ones.
gollark: I see.
gollark: Something involving lots of effort doesn't make it good. Human culture has a weird thing with effort and hard work being intrinsically good and not just good as a way to achieve other things.
gollark: You'd assume someone would have come up with some way to check.

References
  1. 324.cat, ed. (23 April 2014). "Albert Sánchez Piñol prepara la segona part de 'Victus'".
  2. Vilaweb (ed.). "La presentació de 'Victus' als Països Baixos, suspesa per pressions de l'ambaixada espanyola". Retrieved 5 September 2014.
  3. Bassas, Antoni. "L'editorial d'Antoni Bassas". Diari Ara. Retrieved 5 September 2014.
  4. "Spanje verbiedt lezing in Utrecht" (in Dutch).
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