Book review: Waiting for Robert Capa
WAITING FOR ROBERT CAPA
AUTHOR: Susana Fortes
PUBLISHER: HarperCollins Publishers Aust
RRP: $19.99
REVIEWER: Mary Ann Elliott
COMBINING a poignant love story with the immediacy of a bygone era, the 1930s, the catalyst for author Susana Fortes' book was the recent discovery in Mexico of picture-negatives that had been lost for almost 70 years.
They were photographs taken by renowned journalists Robert Capa and Gerda Taro.
The story begins in Paris in 1935 when Capa, a refugee from fascist Hungary, meets Taro, an exile from Nazi Germany.
A year later they travel together to Spain, Europe's most harrowing war zone, to document the outbreak of the Civil War, marking Capa's emergence as a famous war photographer who later covered the D-day landings in Normandy, and later still the Indo-Chinese war.
Written in the style of The English Patient (by Michael Ondaatje and subsequently made into a film starring Ralph Fiennes), Fortes' book is also destined to become a movie, already underway from producer Michael Mann.
Here is a real-life romance against a vivid background of Franco's Fascist uprising and the terrifying realities of war.
Fortes blends historical fact and fiction to produce a beautiful, compelling story of two lovers caught up in the turmoil and tragedy of a war that changed them and their world forever.
