If hybridization is a strong tendency in crime novels, it is due to works such as those of Marc Pastor (Barcelona, 1977), who can be both inside and outside the genre at the same time, as can be seen in his new novel, Riu de safirs (Editions 62). There, a policeman without a vocation arrives in Ilakaka, a small town in the middle of the Madagascar desert where the discovery of sapphires has attracted the worst in every house. There is a fragile balance that is broken with the arrival of a stranger. It's like the movie Yojimbo. “I make remakes. I like to take stories that I like and rewrite them, as I already did in L'any de la plague (La Magrana, 2010) with The invasion of the body snatchers. When everything is like a kind of amalgam, you have to have a cushion to let yourself fall, and in this case I can fall into a story like that of the mercenary who arrives at a place and confronts the two rival gangs,” explains Pastor. The title is also a tribute, in this case to Río Bravo, which inspires an entire chapter, “like a Western cliché.”
The novel was born while Pastor was writing Farishta (Amsterdam, 2017): “On one route the driver asked us if we wanted to see sapphires. We said yes and he took us to Ilakaka, a place where the guide – which we had forgotten – stressed that we did not have to stop. It was like the Far West, with the gold rush, a city in the middle of the desert controlled by mafias... I saw the novel.” The image of the country, he says, “does not come out damaged, but the foreigners, the shitty neocolonialism that is dedicated to putting its boot on the necks of the Malagasy. But capitalism engulfs it even though you can now go tourism in those mines.”
The reader may also be surprised by the continuous references to Camelot, the Fisher King, the Grail...: Arthurian literature is one of my great passions and I wanted to incorporate it. I think it's a double somersault: Madagascar, western and Arthurian literature. In the end, the western here is the paella, to understand it, and the rest is the ingredients, the rice, the prawns... The knights are still cowboys, and the captain, whose name is Artur, is the king."
And everything is entangled in a complex plot in which fatherhood plays a very important role, as does the notion of destiny "because on a literary level, and on a personal level, the fight against destiny, like a sentence, has me obsessed." “Can we change it? It is the background of time travel, in which there are rules that say that everything is immutable but you always look for a way to change it.” “From the first novel I am clear that I am playing and I want the reader to get involved, because this universe of interrelated novels – there may be twenty in which the so-called Corvoverso develops – is a game board,” he says.
To be able to play, in fact, next week Lo rol de Requiem (GdM y Mai Més) is published, a game based on the novel L'horror de requiem (Mai Més, 2020) which for the author "is a wish fulfilled and a pride". "It's also a strange novel, because the reader or the player has to finish it," he says.
The author, Mosso d'esquadra since 1998, is clear that “everywhere we have the same obsessions, the same fears and violence, but the difference is access to weapons and social control, normally by a government. But a Malagasy, an Ecuadorian, someone from Kyiv, or from Lleida, or from Ilakaka, we are the same.
Catalan version, here
