No Pasarán

Max Fridman is a former French secret agent who is called back into service in the late 1930s. The character created by Vittorio Giardino in 1982 is certainly no James Bond superspy or hero performing epic deeds, but simply a professional who roams across Europe on the eve of the Second World War, going from Turkey to Hungary, Greece to Spain. In No Pasarán, Fridman meets an old friend, Ada Treves, in Geneva, the city where he lives. She gets in touch with him to ask him to go to Catalonia, which is riven by the Spanish Civil War in 1938, to find her husband who has gone missing for some months. Fridman and Guido Treves had fought together in the Civil War just a couple of years previously, in the XII International Brigade, so our hero decides to set off in search of his missing companion. Vittorio Giardino paints a picture of Catalonia as it was during the Civil War, with a profound love of history and meticulously researched details in his splendid plates, which he bases on the films, testimonies, and photos of the period. Giardino takes us into the Catalonia of Orwell, Machado, Dos Passos and Hemingway, from Barcelona to the front at Ebro, where Fridman is surrounded by Franco's spies, Russian political advisers, and Belgian journalists. He cannot trust anyone in his search, which will prove to be more dangerous than he expected, highlighting many of the contradictions of that period. No Pasarán Vittorio Giardino Rizzoli Lizard, 2011