En los años setenta, el prestigioso cuentista argentino Raúl de la Torre, residente en París, saltó a la fama al publicar su primera novela. Su popularidad como novelista del boom creció con sus siguientes obras, su segundo e inesperado matrimonio y su implicación política. Todo ello lo coloca en el punto de mira de las crónicas de sociedad cuando decide descubrir públicamente su homosexualidad o cuando se conoce su suicidio de un pistoletazo. Muchos años después, el joven crítico francés Ariel Lenormand se embarca en la biografía del escritor entrevistando a quienes lo conocieron: su editor, sus amigos y, sobre todo, Amelia, su desconcertante y sofisticada primera esposa, compañera y apoyo del autor a lo largo de su vida. Pero el misterioso mundo que rodeaba al escritor amenaza con convertirse en parte de la vida del biógrafo. ¿Qué oscuras presiones lo llevaron a la confesión de su homosexualidad en una época en la que nadie lo hacía? ¿Por qué se suicidó? ¿Cuál es el terrible misterio que esconde su obra novelística? ¿Por qué mienten los testigos después de tantos años?

I initially picked this up because of the opening pages, which I immediately suspected were a homage to the beginning of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca ("Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."). And Du Maurier's novel is, I think, ultimately a helpful point of comparison. The novel does not (fortunately) attempt to imitate Rebecca, but the way it builds its narrative effect is similar: through the gradual revealing of secrets from the past, the enormous power of one person to affect lives in the present even from the grave, the sense of inevitability of events driven by nearly irresistable passions.

In brief (although I don't want to give away too much of the plot): The scholar Ariel Lenormand travels to Paris to research the biography of Raúl de la Torre, a by all accounts brilliant writer who published two novels in the 1970s which made him famous overnight; a decade later, after the mysterious death of his second wife in an automobile accident, he fell madly in love with a young man and publicly declared his homosexuality, but this affair was cut short by the young man’s death from AIDS and Raúl committed suicide shortly thereafter. These basic facts are clear. But Ariel is confronted by dark spaces in Raúl’s biography which he hopes to resolve with the help of the two people who knew Raúl best: his first wife Amelia and his publisher André. Amelia turns out to be cagey and resistant to the intrusion into her past, André is haunted in his own way by Raúl’s memory, and Ariel soon begins making discoveries which suggest that Raúl may have had major secrets that even those closest to him were unaware of.

In other words, this is a literary thriller of the sort that has become popular in recent years. The underlying premise is essentially the same as, for example, A.S. Byatt's Possession. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of Possession--again, not in a derivative sense, but rather because it has the same sense of the investigation taking on a life of its own and capturing all those involved within its spell, and of completely unexpection passions being unleashed.

Unlike Possession, which mostly stays in the narrative “present” as the protagonist unravels the past, so that the reader’s knowledge is limited to what the protagonist knows, this novel jumps back and forth between past and present, between Ariel’s investigations and Amelia’s memories. At first I doubted the effectiveness of this narrative choice, but in the course of the novel the reasons for the choice became clear: we, the readers, are gradually able to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle, but the characters cannot; to the very end, each of them only has a partial view of events: what really happened on the day Raúl’s second wife died, why he married her in the first place when it was clear he never loved her, and why he never wrote more than two novels. Raúl’s shadow lies heavy over all the characters, and their memories are often painful. As we gradually come to understand the scars they bear and the misunderstandings that have shaped their lives, we also understand their reasons for choosing to remain silent.

Although the suspense of the story depends on the plot (or rather, our process of piecing it together), it is the characters and the psychological drama that ultimately make the novel successful. It’s not perfect--a few of the discoveries are a bit too coincidental to be plausible--but nonetheless an effective portrayal of a group of people whose lives have all been permanently marked by one man (he left his brand on them, like horses, to mark his ownership, one of the characters muses at one point). And it is a reminder of how we all create our own stories of the past, stories that are incomplete and distorted by our wishes and fears, and what happens when these stories are called into question.

(Read in a German translation by Stefanie Gerhold.)

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De jonge hispanist Ariel Lenormand wil een biografie schrijven over Raúl de la Torre, een bekende Spaans-Amerikaanse schrijver van de generatie van García Márquez en Vargas Llosa. Lenormand neemt daartoe contact op met De La Torres eerste vrouw, Amelia. Naar aanleiding van deze ontmoeting komt de biograaf tot een aantal verrassende ontdekkingen, niet alleen met betrekking tot het leven van De la Torre maar ook met betrekking tot diens oeuvre. Het beste deel daarvan - twee romans - blijkt niet door hem zelf maar door Amelia te zijn geschreven. Op zichzelf is dit een interessant thema maar Barceló is helaas niet in staat om daar interessante literatuur van te maken. Daarvoor is haar stijl te expliciet, te damesromanachtig. Haar personages missen diepgang en geheimzinnigheid. Ze hadden beter verdiend dan de clichématige gedachten en gevoelens die Barceló hun toedicht.

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Een intrigerende roman, speelt in Parijs eind 20e eeuw. Een jonge criticus gaat een biografie schrijven over een in parijs wonende argentijnse schrijver. Naarmate hij meer aan de weet komt, wordt het geheimzinniger : de plotselinge scheiding van zijn eerste vrouw, het ongeluk van zijn tweede vrouw, zijn late uitkomen voor zijn homoseksualiteit en zijn zelfmoord. Tussendoor de liefdesaffaire van de biograaf met de ex vrouw van de schrijver. Heel spannend en boeiend geschreven, tot het eind! Een boek om moeilijk weg te leggen. ( )