“What would happen if a great detective came to Barcelona to solve a crime?” her friend Miquel Mora asked Sylvia Lagarda-Mata (Barcelona, 1961). Said and, after a few years, done, with a novel that, in addition, has just won the II Santa Eulàlia de Novel·la prize for Barcelona: Veus de mort als Encants Vells (Comanegra), which arrives in bookstores tomorrow . And who is the detective? Well, neither more nor less than the first in literature, the Auguste Dupin created by Edgar Allan Poe in The Murders on Morgue Street in 1841. Lagarda-Mata, however, not only makes him the protagonist, but for the plot uses what could be the first serial killer: the murderous bookseller of Barcelona, which was published as a true fact – and by an anonymous author – in 1836 in the Gazette des Tribunaux, and which resonated in pens such as those of Jules Janin and Charles Nodier, and even a very young Flaubert. Here, however, it did not arrive until Ramon Miquel i Planas translated and adapted Flaubert's version and later made his own, in 1928 (La llegenda del llibreter assassi de Barcelona), which a few years ago was still reproduced by Marcel Fité in the novel The veritable history of the assassi llibreter of Barcelona (Edicions de 1984, 2020).
According to the jury, made up of Francesco Ardolino, Llucia Ramis, Enric H. March, Jordi González and Alba Cayón, “the text maintains a literary game with two great historical references combined in an original and credible way,” and highlights “the meticulous work of archival documentation and the ability to transfer information within a detective fiction story, with ghostly touches, set in Barcelona in the mid-19th century", in addition to "the recreation of a map of the city rich in social, economic nuances and politicians", without forgetting "a special mention to the construction of characters, dialogues and transitions that reveal great scenic and cinematographic potential." And one of the objectives of the award, with a prize of 25,000 euros, is, as Fèlix Riera, director of Àfora Focus Edicions – convener of the award with the Comanegra publishing house – has said, “to go beyond the written text and create synergies with theater and audiovisuals.” For Riera, “everything is literature in the city of Barcelona,” to explain that this year's award also consists of a photograph by Francesc Català-Roca in which a child looks at a bookstore window. For editor Jordi Puig, in addition to being “the perfect cocktail for the award”, between history and criminal chronicle, the novel “broadens the map of Barcelona at the time”. A plane that takes the protagonist to the Rambla, of course, but also to the Encants – the oldest in Europe, as they have their origin in the Middle Ages –, then around the current Plaza de Correos, but also passes through the square. del Oli, or the Vinyeta shanties, in Montjuïc, the Voltes d'en Cirés or the Santa Creu hospital, and even in the historic anatomical theater of the current Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia.
The author, an expert in the history of the city, does not limit herself to placing Dupin in the city to solve some crimes, but rather traces a vital adventure “filling in the gaps left by Poe, which are many.” Thus, on the one hand he has him raised in Perpignan, so that he has no problem getting along with the people of Barcelona, and on the other he insists a lot on his relationship with the North American writer, an ambiguous relationship that he amplifies from a passage in which Poe describes them “walking through the Paris night arm in arm.”
The writer explains that “Barcelona has cyclically been a fashionable city in Europe, as it was in 1840,” when she sets the plot, a turbulent time with hustle and bustle and a lot of tension. “We Catalans are very sorry to compliment each other, we love the Victorian London of Jack the Ripper, but Barcelona gives a lot of itself and deserves this game,” says Lagarda-Mata, who, without denying, does not want to close her novel in the historical genres. or black.
Although she had been developing the novel for “many years,” the existence of the prize spurred her to finish it and focus it geographically, so that “the reader can be transported with a time machine to a city imprisoned by the walls.”
Catalan version, here
