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For a crime novel it boasts a highly intellectual style and Carvalho has a cultured , political, literate, gourmand outlook. Indeed at times it reads more like a cookery book. Unfortunately the 'intellectual' can sometimes appear pretentious as follows, '...he was not so much ugly as counterposing a restlessness to the image of placidity which she radiated'. Maybe this is just a translation issue?
It is all an acquired taste. A mixture of literary essay, cook-book, Barcelona tour-guide with no suspense, drama or mystery. Montalban displays his politics with stuff like, 'Ever since the Soviet Union went down, morality has come back into fashion' and 'When I hear the word philosophy, I reach for my gun'. These outbursts together with a recurring obsession with burning books simply do not tally with the rather aloof and effete Carvalho.
It is one of those novels where the author and his style overwhelm the story. If you like the 'style' there is plenty of Pepe to read but for me it was too much.
Cocaine deals, heroin overdoses -- they're all in a good cause, as Barcelona detective Pepe Carvalho discovers as he juggles two women and two cases. It's a few months before the Olympics start in his home town and everyone is gearing up for them. Capitalism is triumphant, Communism a fond memory.
An Olympic aerialist has tumbled to earth; he hauls his wheelchaired body around the gym his lover now bosses. She has left her husband, the publishing magnate Brando. Beba, the young Brando girl, gives her father nightmares. While he sleeps she is cruising the mean streets where the pushers live, going God knows where, returning only to present him at breakfast with a series of overnight lovers his own age. Carvalho's job is to find out what she's doing and stop her. Brando fils doubles his father's fee. That's the simple case.
Carvalho assigns his assistant Biscuter, a dwarfish Archie/Bunter, to trail Beba. Meanwhile he leads the beautiful Claire and her companion Lebrun in search of the Greek husband who left her in Paris. He taps an old comrade, turned Olympic official, for information. A painter friend gives them entrée into the maze of midnight streets and fashionable dissolution. Artists and models guide them to a warehouse mausoleum of abandoned industrialism. Another Greek, the young Dimitrios, is to be found at the same time.
For its thorough exploration of the netherworld of sunny Barcelona, for its strange humor and pungent characterizations, for the way the detective finally shows he lives by a code and not by whim or a desire to settle old scores, this novel -- and the rest of the Pepe Carvalho series -- become highly recommended. Stack alongside your classics from around the world.
This is a very existentialist, absurdist (where's Edward Albee when you need him) metaphysical journey of a man whose life is becoming redundant, even to him. Carvalho spends way to much time trying to live in his past and finds that much of what he remembers is now changed to fit what he wants to remember as opposed to what actually happened. There is a touch of the Alain Robbe-Grillet, 'nouveau roman' to the whole book that goes along well with the allusions from Barrie' 'Peter Pan'.
This seems to me to be the 'swan song' for Carvalho as the 'devil may care' communist/collaborator/detective, and the maturing of his personality to fit the changes in Spain with the passing of Franco and its' entry into the European Community. Depending on how you read it, it's either a very good book, or just a jumble of attitudes, happenings and words. Your call.
The novel's opening scene could have been taken straight from a Peter Sellers movie. Claire Delmas, a eye-boggling French beauty, and her friend the Olympic agent Georges Lebrun, pay a visit to Pepe Carvalho, Barcelona's aging private-eye, gastronome extraordinaire, and repentent Communist. Carvalho (pronounced "car-valyu") is truly an unorthodox figure among private-eyes. Immediately, it is evident that he is much more of a psychiatrist than a private-eye, braving the dangers of his clients' conversation instead of the world of crime. Claire and Lebrun are looking for Alekos, Claire's renegade Greek husband turned homosexual. Their search for him -- chaperoned by Carvalho -- leads them through a motley of comic scenes in Barcelona.
Perhaps uniquely among detective novels, Carvalho is simultaneously at work on a curious, entirely unrelated second "case". Luis Brando, a wealthy publisher (no relation to Marlon), engages him to keep an eye on Beba, his nymphomaniac teenage daughter. Beba is a lusty lass with a penchant for screwing old men. Carried out alongside the search for Alekos, Beba's case leads Carvalho through a riotous labyrinth of crazy characters and a hilarious tour of Barcelona by night.
While I enjoyed the novel immensely and I understand it's largely a satire on "cultural hooliganism" (Carvalho's phrase), I have to admit that there are some trashy scenes. Montalbán could have excluded them and not damaged his story. I'm not a prude, but from time to time he overkilled the sex and profanity. So much so that to be frank, I was ready for the novel to end.
Nevertheless, the book was a fantastic read and I'm eager to find more Montalbán. 5 stars.
Unlike some of his previous books, this book does not pound home the author's political views, which might be good in some ways but just leaves us with an aging sensualist protagonist longing to be young and virile again. Pepe is exposed as selfish, self indulgent, self centered, self everything--though that may not be the author's intention.
I must say that Montalban has a way of making even the weak plots in this book somewhat interesting, and so the book was not a total loss. The parts about Pepe's love of gourmet food are always tactilely satisfying also. However, I cannot recommend this book because it is really just about a lot of immoral people doing their thing.
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