Ahmad Saidullah reviews
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's
Tatoo
.
Tattoo, the second in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho murder mysteries, first appeared in Spanish as Tatuaje (Tattoos) in 1976. The lyrics from Tatuaje “bold and blond as beer was he / A heart tattooed on his chest,” by the Catalan artist Rafael de León, a friend of García Lorca’s and Antonio Machado’s, made famous by the singer Concha Piquer, appear as an epigraph and recur throughout the book. (...)
Fans of Pepe Carvalho will be pleased, nonetheless. While Tattoo will not satisfy most readers, it provides a brief, if uncomfortable, introduction to a writer and his detective who ought to be better known to English readers.
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Laura Wilson reviews
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Tattoo.
This month sees a welcome reissue of many of Spanish author Vázquez Montalbán's titles, although this particular book, which first appeared in 1976, is being published here for the first time. His Barcelona-based private eye is Pepe Carvalho, an arresting combination of machismo and an old-womanish fussiness about comestibles: a bit like James Bond, without all those irritating gadgets. A local hairdresser hires Carvalho to discover the identity of a young man whose body is pulled out of the sea, heavily disfigured but bearing a tattoo. The plot is slight but enjoyable, and the picture of post-Franco Spain subtly drawn. Although the text is lumbered with an unwieldy translation, it is easy to see why Vázquez Montalbán was recently named one of the 50 best crime writers of all time.
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In The Buenos Aires Quintet, first published in 1997, we find Pepe in Buenos Aires, bringing that city to life in the way he does Barcelona. Pepe’s been hired by an uncle of his who wants to locate his son, now back in Argentina after years of exile in Spain. What does Pepe know of Argentina? "Tango, the disappeared, Maradona," he flippantly answers, although Pepe is fully aware of Argentina’s history. Once there, he encounters people of around his age who fought against the military take-over in 1976; i.e., the "subversives," most of whom have "disappeared." The nephew he is sent to find, Raúl Tourón, was aligned with these left-wing Perónists, although he worked as a research behavioral scientist and, in fact, made an important discovery in working with rats: that a link exists between animal behavior and the quality of animal feed. Put another way: "he taught how to treat people like rats." The military dictatorship stole his research, putting it to use for their own ends. The following year Raúl’s house was raided and his wife, the lovely, militant activist Belma was shot and their baby daughter taken away. Raúl was taken into custody as was his sister-in-law Alma, but they were later released. Raúl doesn’t learn the facts until much later, but it was his father, already in exile in Spain, who made a deal with the military junta to spare their lives and get them out of prison.
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An Olympic Death, which first came out in 1991, is set in a pre-Olympic Barcelona, a city far different from the one it was soon to become, with its newly created beach front and the inevitable arrival of cruise ships, turning it into slick, urban tourist attraction. 1991 was an emotionally wrenching year for many of us who lived here as we watched the city being dug up, torn down and rebuilt. Construction work was everywhere you looked; cranes dominated the landscape. At that time the Barceloneta "chiringuitos" (the tattered but colorful open-air restaurants) dotted the beach. You could sit at a wooden table smack on the sand and enjoy an affordable paella year-round (some even provided wool blankets to keep the customers warm in winter). When those were pulled down that, for me, marked the end of an era. Beach dining shifted to the overly priced Olympic Port, which doesn’t even provide a view of the sea in most cases. A hastily and ill-conceived Olympic Village was constructed which looked like standard-issue welfare housing (with apartments selling for extraordinary prices) that within a few years was looking run down. The "community" that was to have grown around this area never developed and is now surrounded by much dead space. A superfluous airport-like mall went up at the other end of the port (trendy bars, including one of the city’s many new Irish bars, and a miniature golf course are located on its terrace rooftop; a McDonald’s and a Ben and Jerry’s sit below.)
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