Merton is an Argentine writer who goes to the Barcelona of the 1990s –dominated by the brilliance of lavish literary prizes– to meet super-agent Nuria Monclús –a copy of Carmen Balcells, since she was created by José Donoso– and You will find yourself involved in a literary-detective plot that will lead you to investigate philosophical and existential enigmas, to delve into cryptic literary texts, visit places like the Pedralbes monastery and look for clues in the past, that is, the mythical Barcelona of the Latin American boom of the 60s and 70s.
That is the approach of The Last Time (Destiny), the new novel by Guillermo Martínez (Bahía Blanca, 1962), who, in a sunny office at the Balcells agency, says that “this book was born from my first visit to Barcelona, also to meet Carmen Balcells. She sent me her driver so that I could go around the city with him, as described in the novel, she kept us going around for two hours. Years later, I learned that it was because he had Augusto Roa Bastos at home, whom he had rescued because his wife mistreated him. In the novel, I put it because she was meeting with a minister, something that she also used to do. Arriving with the driver at Tibidabo –which means 'all this I will give you'– the character has a perception of the Mephistophelian side of Monclús. Balcells plays a Faustian role, a theme that has to do with my first novel, About Roderer (1996)”.
Merton is a literary critic come to less for the problems that his honesty in the judgments he makes in the press has brought him. “In the 90s –recalls Martínez–, in each country there was at least one critic like that, at the same time fearsome but erudite and fair, influential characters who decided the success or failure of a book, it is a figure that disappeared with social networks . Despite the arbitrariness they could commit, we miss them a little."
In novels such as The Next Time (1895) by Henry James or If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979) by Italo Calvino “plays with the antagonistic figures of the successful writer versus the prestigious writer. Balcells once told me: 'Every writer, whatever he says, wants either prestige or money'. I wanted to merge the two characters into one, that would be for a few or successful depending on who was looking at it”. Something similar happens to Martínez himself, who has known "both sides of the counter, he was only known in literary circles and, suddenly, I had a great success, The Oxford Murders (2003) -made into a film by Álex de la Church–, which is the worst sin that can be committed in the literary world”. But they are not always antagonistic models: "The joke (1967) by Milan Kundera sold a lot, like Sinuhé the Egyptian (1945) by Mika Watari, which for me is like a Quixote, although it is not integrated into the canon".
In Barcelona, Merton must read, commissioned by Monclús, the novel by A, a well-established Argentine author, well established in the city who, "gravely ill, regrets that his work is the victim of a huge misunderstanding, that it has not been well read and they love him for what he doesn't really do. Almost all writers have that feeling of not being well read, they think that they have not been able to see the reading levels of his book. When one writes, there is a brain storm, and much of what one thinks later does not settle in the text”. Merton's investigations refer to those of Martínez's previous books, where logical series of symbols or words in foreign languages had to be deciphered. “Here, it is a strictly literary problem: we writers believe that we say something but we are at the mercy of the interpretation of the readers, who can even interpret the opposite of what we wanted to say.”
The novel within the novel, the one that Merton reads, is like a grail, a philosophical-literary project so ambitious that it seems to exceed the capacity of a human being. Regarding the writer's degenerative disease, "I was inspired by the last days of Ricardo Piglia, who surrounded himself with students to whom he dictated."
There is a sentimental vaudeville part, flirtations between Merton and A's wife, as well as their daughter, which is "an erotic subtext that works as a suspense element like corpses in a crime novel, giving each both the shocks”. In the most carnal parts, he reflects on the fact that “sex is not respectable for critics, there are no erotic novels in the canon, it suffers an even greater contempt than that of the detective novel. Suicide has more literary prestige than sex."
Martínez, a former professor of mathematical logic, had a writer father who, on Sundays, gathered his children to read them stories and then made them write their own fictions. “I thought that my literary life was going to be similar to my dad's, a hobby, he sent his writings to contests. It was Balcells who gave me the encouragement that he was not only going to publish, but would be known throughout the world, he breathed into us dreams of greatness, he was the engine behind our hesitant breath. He removed all the obstacles in the way so that we could write. Many authors approached her believing that, like King Midas, she was going to cover them with gold.
There are references to the private life of the authors –the one in which Balcells intervened so many times–, for example “with a wife who is not even interested in reading her husband's works”.
