Waiting for Blood

I've been ending day lately with an hour or two of reading Jose Maria Gironella's, The Cypresses Believe in God, a massive novel set on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Given the novel's sheer size, and that it starts out spending so much time just giving a sense of early 30s Spain as a place and time, as the civil war itself begins to approach one feels with the characters a certain creeping unreality, as the descent of politics and then society as a whole into factional violence seems to become first imaginable, then possible, and finally inevitable.

Having fallen asleep, as it were, in 1935 Catalonia, it was with an odd sense of unreality that I clicked on a link this morning and found a New York Times columnist declaring it impossible to work with his political opponents peacefully and darkly predicting "there will be blood".