Customer Reviews

Southern Seas

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Highly recommended hard-boiled detective novel that looks at the cultural malaise of Spain in general and Barcelona in particular coming out of thirty years of Fascist dictatorship. Every character in this book has a serious political past and agenda, and they recite their political evolution and handily give the details of which party they recently voted for and why in the same fashion that Law & Order interviewees cynically give the details of their professional pitfalls. The hero Pepe Carvalho is so wacked out he burns books (but why is the question,) and he seems to be an overweight balding alcoholic with gourmand tendencies, but he's still a hit with the ladies. And the story is excellently written, and at once amusing and sad.

Once again Montalban hypnotizes us with his great story-telling ability, his poetry, his stunning metaphores and unforgettable characters. Detective literature never aimed this high. Winner of many prestigious awards including "The Raymond Chandler Award", Southern Seas introduces us to the figure of Pepe Carvalho, detective, gourmet, wine-expert, philosopher, lover, former member of the Communist Party and the CIA. The setting is Barcelona, Spain, in the post-Franco era. Images of rare beauty and impressive power alternate in this atypical "who done it?" story. Montalban succeeds in elevating the genre to a higher level and, perhaps, creates a genre on its own. More Montalban, please!

This is a book, I'd say, about a man of a certain age, who's done all his living, is tired, and asks himself all too frequently, why am I still hanging on. The plot is not as important as the honesty of the author's feelings and the artistry of the writing.

The honesty is that of an author expressing to you his likes and his dislikes, his disgust and his love, as they actually are. If you don't like them, you won't like this book either. The artistry of the writing is an unobtrusive blending of styles that shows that the author is a lover of books after all, despite whatever currently happens to be burning in Pepe Carvalho's fireplace: satirical portraits (the Marquess), sensitive portrayals (Yes, Biscuter), extremely trashy descriptions of sex (Pepe's), an outstanding description of a hangover ("Never again . . . ."), lots of hard-boiled detective talk, stream of consciousness a la Joyce, and, every so often, similes worthy of Vergil. And the food. Always the food.

By the end of the story we see that the world-weary tough guy has come to the rescue of quite a few damsels in distress and may be just a big softie after all. Maybe that's the secret of his appeal to women. But one could well ask how it is possible for an old guy to enjoy the company of so many different women and still be so down all the time. Well, it's his story, not yours. If you don't like the book, you know what you can do with it.

Pepe Carvalho is one of the most complex characters that you will find in any collection of stories. He most famous for his epicurean, gastronomic and detective skills; but he is politically unfaithful and socially strange. He has a relationship with a 'call-girl' for eight years and seems to revel in having sex with woman in their late teens and early twenties (he's over forty and over weight). His personality, which is nothing to write home about, seems to be an aphrodisiac to young spanish woman experiencing a new 'freedom' in Spain following Franco's death.

From reading Vazquez Montalban (VM) you would think that in the 1980s all anyone in Spain talked about was politics of the Left, and that the Right had given up having any control with Franco dead. But people talk politics like they live in Revolutionary France and expect that the Reds will be taking over any day.

From the point of view of the twenty-first century, and a Spain that is now part of the upper elite of the European Union, the books have not worn well sociologically. The characters, both rich and poor, seem to have all the depth of a graphic novel but none of the adventure. VM is able to make his points about the changes to post-Franco in an almost naive way, knowing what we know now. I guess that politics never wear well. But the stories themselves are involving.