It's not that I'm very passionate about labels and organization that good order imposes. Even less when it comes to determining creative or artistic aspects so far removed from any classificatory will. But the truth is that at the moment in which from the mere observation of a bibliography (in this case that of Carme Riera), it is necessary to differentiate creative stages, nothing more relevant can be signified than the author's own will to change. A very healthy intention to discover new narrative voices in the same creator.
And everything that is looking for oneself, or challenging oneself, or exploring new paths other than easy positioning is always commendable, regardless of a lesser or greater degree of achievement.
And yes, in addition, it is possible to navigate with equal ease through different waters, the gift ends up being confirmed. And any reader or critic has no choice but to remove his hat to recognize that kind of communion between genius and will.
Carme Riera has cultivated the story, the essay and the novel. And it is in this last aspect of fictional narrative where it has also been lavished on disparate genres such as historical fiction, crime fiction, sociological portraiture or a particular manners.
So in this writer, academic of the language and awarded in prestigious recognitions of the letters, novels can be found for all tastes.
Top 3 best novels by Carme Riera
In the last blue
As a historical novelist, this is perhaps his most successful novel. For this, Carme Riera focused on some tragic events in her Majorcan land.
That the course of the Jewish people has traditionally been an odyssey, there is no doubt, that in the Spain of the various civilizations there was a time when they were considered staunch enemies of everything Spanish, even using the justification of Christianity for this, neither is it may doubt.
The autos de fé were reproduced throughout Spain for 300 years! In this book we meet a group of Jews who, around March 7, 1687, fled forward.
The fear of ending up subjected to those summary trials in which the defense simply did not exist led them to a search for new worlds aboard any ship. They failed and the ultimate truth of faith haunted them during their last days.
A fascinating story of that dark world in which Carme introduces us to very different characters, from the most hypocritical nobles to the noblest souls on the street.
I will avenge your death
Economic prosperity usually hides, under the warm cloak of its natural cycle, the worst of the human condition: ambition. And it is that in that frenzy of money that circulates wildly when they paint gold, that ambition that in the abstract could be considered as a legal economic drive, ends up awakening monsters, like Goya's dream of reason.
Spain in 2004 was that country that still believed in the impossible inertia that guides the invisible hand of Adam Smith, only that this hand, as in games of chance, ends up dragging everything to the bank (understand banking, rich, powerful and other elites guided by ambition).
In that economy turned into a game, cheating was the order of the day, corruption rode with the acquiescence of short-term politicians (there are no other kinds), who only understand that if today works well, the immediate tomorrow will have more votes.
A perfect setting for Carme Riera to present us the plot of this novel, in tune with that other novel of hers, Almost Still Life. Agent Rosario Hurtado gives the witness on this occasion to Helena MartÃnez, a private detective who must find out what happened to a Catalan businessman.
The search for Helena ends up becoming an easily recognizable scenario of our most recent past, the one that caused our current situation before the change in the economic paradigm in which we still do not know what horizons await us.
And it is that the plot moves to two waters, between the thriller and the social criticism, like a kind of eighties crime novel, in the style of Gonzalez Ledesma, an intention that was well needed in this genre to recover that idea of ​​a crime novel whose darkness hangs over very close social and political realities.
What is darker than the corruption and falsehood of so many characters that we see circulating on the news? Eloquent politicians who end up discovering themselves as first-rate thieves who end up escaping from justice under the protection of the prescription of crimes ...
Thus, a novel with great black novel taste and that comes to entertain and chronicle our times. A brilliant novel with great doses of irony to see what moves in the high spheres of power.
The voice of the siren
In a versatile writer like Carme, surprise is always guaranteed. If to this interesting factor we add the good work of a total writer, we find in this novel an allegory of feminism, or of goodness, or of the sublimation of fantasy and fable in the face of so much ignominy today.
The protagonist is the little mermaid, yes, that half-woman, half-fish character that, when Andersen published it back in 1837, could delight readers around the world. But the story had its shortcomings, or its loopholes, or its half-truths.
Carme Riera gives voice to the little mermaid to justify her self-denial. Blind love deprived her at the time of exposing her explanations. Now comes the time to listen to it and understand it between its mythological role and a much more current reading ... A novel that would have delighted a Jose Luis Sampedro with her transcendental Old Mermaid under her arm.
