Las buenas intenciones ("The good intentions") is a title surely taken from a popular Spanish proverb: "El camino del infierno esta sembrado de buenas intenciones" or "The path to Hell is sewn with good wills". Max Aub knew well this. He was a Jewish- Spanish writer but practically unknown in Spain after the Civil War because he was censored by Franco. I think this novel refers to the many Spanish people that in the previous years of these terrible war, were deeply indifferent to politics and social affairs. If not so, perhaps they could have avoided the war. In effect, there was by then in Spain not only fascists and communists, or very rich and very poor people, but yet some middle class people and this book deal with them. Maux Aub attacks their stupidity. This is personified in many personages, mainly the protagonist, Agustin Alfaro, named as his father -a relatively prosperous merchant- is at the beginning in 1924, wrongly accussed of having made pregnant a young girl. The true father is his own father because people confounds them owing their same name, but the young Agustin is forced to marry with the girl because his father doesn't want to know nothing about his own affairs with women. From these grotesque episode the life of Agustin, otherside a laborious and decent, but indifferent man, is a sucession of bitter episodes sometimes with a comical side. This indifference gets in the beginning of the war in 1936, and the end three years later with the victory of Franco. Agustin, who lives accidentally in the Republican side but never fougth in the war, is shot and killed by the fascists troops while a man named Tellina, delinquent and murderer, burns wisely his documents and becomes a rich man under Franco's rule.