Some books purport to be about a thing (Al Qaeda, or salt) and then are actually about that thing (Al Qaeda, or salt); other books purport to be about one thing (horses, or photography, or cocaine) and are rather about a different thing (tradition, or decency, or experiment). The best books purport to be about one thing and are rather about all other things, about tradition and decency and experiment. The Anatomy of a Moment, by the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas, falls into this last category. It purports to be about one thing—a miscarried coup d’etat, or golpe de estado, staged as a hostage-taking at the Cortes, the Spanish legislative assembly, in February of 1981, which was broadcast live on the radio and later shown on television—or, even more specifically, not even about the coup itself but about a single moment at the beginning of the coup, but is secretly and not so secretly about so many things it seems to verge on the inexhaustible.
