The 3 best books of Manuel Vázquez Montalban

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán He was more than a writer. His life and work come together to establish the writer and character as a hallmark of modern Spain after the dark years of the dictatorship, although using the intense social and political embers of a very prolific post-Franco era in shadows on which to build arguments. blacks with well-founded certainties.

Author of great novels, but also a poet, journalist and essayist, as well as an activist and person committed to politics when doing politics against the current of the main orientation was a risky activity...

With its 1979 Planet Award He had achieved that point of prestige, however, a few years ago, when his character of Pepe Carvalho was born to accompany him throughout his life in a variety of adventures.

Because separating the author from the character in this case is an extremely difficult task. It seems as if this detective has appropriated the entire creative process for his work of fiction, leading to a gazillion novels, installments and his later films.

A sick readership always wanted more from Carvalho. Even some other writer like Italian Andrea Camilleri, came to baptize his most famous character as Montalbano, acknowledging his admiration for the work of Vázquez Montalban in the detective and crime novel.

So determine the three best novels of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán will be conditioned by a work associated with a character, detective Pepe Carvalho. In fact, between 2012 and 2013, the eight volumes of a legendary collection were released. And now yes, let's go with the...

3 recommended books by Vázquez Montalbán

The birds of Bangkok

A singular delivery for good old Pepe Carvalho, who traveled to Bangkok to solve a case and reorganize his life ... In 1979, Stuart Pedrell, an important businessman, was found dead when everyone assumed him to be taking a trip through the city. Polynesia.

Detective Pepe Carvalho has to investigate the crime and little by little he begins to learn about the peculiar personality of the victim and his obsession to follow in Gauguin's footsteps and go to the South Seas. A novel that reflects the personal and collective conflicts of the Spain of that time. Apparently, Pepe Carvalho travels to Bangkok to attend the SOS of an old friend, Teresa Marsé.

But in reality the reader may come to the conclusion that he is fleeing from his everyday world, in which reality is insufficient and pushes him to chase ghosts, such as Celia Mataix, murdered with a bottle of unknown brand champagne, or that of his murderer, Marta Miguel, a self-made woman from a town in Salamanca.

Or perhaps the real reason for the trip is to know the name of the birds of Bangkok, or to confirm that the Earth is round and that the real outcome awaits you upon your return.

The birds of Bangkok

The south seas

I already know that this is his work awarded with the Planet. But the official does not always have to be the best. And this space is my blog, and here is my most subjective opinion. Second place for her.

In the Barcelona of 1979, on the eve of the municipal elections, the private detective Pepe Carvalho has to investigate the causes of a mysterious crime. An important businessman named Stuart Pedrell is found to be stabbed to death in an extreme neighborhood of the city when, for a year, everyone has supposed him on a trip to Polynesia.

Carvalho finds out what he did in the course of this year, begins to know the peculiar personality of the victim - his intellectual hobbies and his obsession to follow in Gauguin's footsteps and go to the South Seas, which in the novel is an insistent symbol of dreamed and unrealizable vital fullness - and it unravels a complicated mess that has as its background a feeling of general frustration.

From high society to the underworld of the suburbs, the novel draws an intense picture of characters and environments that reflects the personal and collective conflicts of the Spain of that time.

The south seas

The choke

Almost out of necessity, we left the Carvalho universe and focused on this unique novel. A story about the Boston Strangler that seems to extend into something else, into reflections on late XNUMXth century society.

Notes of fatalism and decadence and… yet it is a novel about the Boston Strangler. «This enigmatic novel, considered a milestone in contemporary Spanish narrative, is the story of a madman who, confined in a prison asylum, launches his volleys against the world and remembers his own story, the personal adventures of the Boston Strangler, full of of false or authentic clues that make the reader doubt that this madman is a strangler, that he has murdered as many people as he claims and that the city of his misadventures is Boston.

The choke
4.7/5 - (8 votes)

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