•
Rating: "The lonely man - who has been in prison - returns to prison
every time he bites into a piece of bread."
These verses by Pavese are what one of the many minor characters of this novel, an Argentine oligarch, ex-guerrilla, then ex-blackmailer, ex-corrupt manager, and many other little things, declares to have remained faithful to.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán must have a fondness for Pavese, as references to the writer from Santo Stefano can also be found in his other books.
I have never been to Argentina and consequently to Buenos Aires.
The Buenos Aires I found in this novel is a snow globe, filled with a very dense broth, almost a jelly, made of human emotions, the smell of asados, tangos, blood, melancholy, anger, and hopeless suffering (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, demonstrations in memory of the night of the pencils) and more that I struggle to describe.
In this broth moves detective Pepe Carvalho in a sort of dreamlike journey which features characters like the fake illegitimate son of Jorge Luis Borges, fake Robinson Crusoe and Friday, murderous chefs, “malefemmene,” and, above all, a handful of human remnants of a twenty-year-old past (military dictatorship, dirty war, desaparecidos, Falklands War, the Trial, things I know little about).
Among these are the survivors of a group of former Marxist revolutionaries.
One of these is a woman, blonde, green-eyed, the navel around which the whole story revolves.
A creature that finds herself in a state overlap like Schrödinger's cat among the souls of two sisters who led the gang.
“Have you seen Alma? She seems real, right? No, she's not real.”
She now teaches literature and occasionally welcomes between her legs one of her fellow travelers, more with a maternal attitude than that of a lover.
Two have changed their spots and moved from fighting power to become part of the power.
One is a failed theater actor who has reincarnated into the scales of a show presenter at a tango club.
And then there's a ghost who returns after years in Spain, bringing with him the past from twenty years ago.
To track him down, the detective protagonist must leave his Ramblas, his Barcelona, and set foot in Argentina. And he, like me, seems lacking in references to navigate that world, to the point that some people feel obliged to provide him unsolicited directions, stereotypes good at synthesizing Argentina for passing foreigners (“tango, Maradona, and desaparecidos”).
Pepe Carvalho is built on the “Phil Marlowe” model using a very close mold. He is all short and caustic quips like:
"Private detective?" (a question asked by someone the detective requests for information), answer: "Sociologist";
"Can you prove it?" (a question asked by a policeman), answer: "It's not a theorem".
In fact, it seems like you're really dealing with Marlowe if it weren't for his great passions, cooking and setting fire to books.
Despite the detective's prominent presence, I'm not sure if this book can be categorized in the noir genre (even if I labeled it as such), hard-boiled or more generally detective. If I had to find a definitive definition, I'd use what I mentioned earlier: a dreamlike journey of the protagonist.
The story proceeds like a magma of words and dialogues, changing scenes often with nonchalance from one line to the next, without a chapter break to underline it.
A hint of the surreal also peeks through, which is one of the ingredients that M. Vázquez Montalbán occasionally likes to use. The chapter "Murderers in the Gourmet Club" is enjoyable from this perspective.
For those who don't know the writer, his surname will still sound familiar, there's a reason, but I don't feel like talking about it.
Loading comments slowly
