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Five Spanish authors you should read this summer

One of the best attended annual gatherings of Spanish-language writers anywhere is held in Gijón, in northern Spain, and every year they unveil their pick of newly published books by their peers.

Five Spanish authors you should read this summer
Four of the winners (L to R): Miguel Barrero, Sofía Rhei, José María Espinar and David Llorente. Photo: Adela MacSwiney.

The Semana Negra (“Noir Week”) prizes have no major sponsors or money attached, just the enormous prestige they have gathered in 30 editions of the festival, to which one million people flock every summer.

In keeping with the festival’s tradition of eliminating what it sees as false boundaries between high- and low-brow literature, the prizes cover a number of categories which are entertaining yet thought-provoking, original and informative.

Here are the five prize-winners from the 2017 festival whose books would make great holiday reading this summer:

David Llorente

The jewel in the crown is the Hammett Prize for best crime novel, named after Dashiel Hammett, the 20th century American author who practically invented modern, gritty crime writing. This year it went to “Madrid Frontera” (“Frontier Madrid”) by David Llorente.

“Although any of the finalists would have been worthy of the prize, the jury stress that the winning novel stood out for its originality and daring style, as well as its ability to use literature as a tool for protest,” jury chairwoman and crime writer Noemí Sabugal said at a packed  news conference called to announce the prizes.

READ ALSO: Top ten great books about Spain

Llorente describes a Spanish capital peopled by the homeless who scavenge in rubbish bins to survive, people who’ve been evicted and have no access to healthcare, and for whom the country’s much-vaunted economic recovery is simply surreal. Although billed as crime novel, it has a strong dash of terror to keep the pages turning.

José María Espinar

The Silverio Cañada Memorial Prize for best first crime novel was awarded to “El Peso del Alma” (The Weight of the Soul) by José María Espinar. It begins when a private investigator called Milton Vértebra receives a ‘phone call from an old school friend saying a colleague has disappeared. Vértebra soon finds himself following a gruesome trail of bodies, all of which have their brains missing. The title is based on an estimate that bodies suddenly weigh 21 g less after death. 

Miguel Barrero

“La Tinta del Calamar” (Squid’s ink) won the Rodolfo Walsh prize for best non-fiction crime book, in which Miguel Barrero describes an unsolved murder committed in Gijón, in 1976, when Spain was emerging from 40 years of dictatorship and taking its first tentative steps towards democracy. The slaying of a popular fisherman, whose body was found with multiple stab wounds in a building which mysteriously burned down, caused such a commotion that it is still felt 40 years on.

Sofía Rhei

Sofía Rhei took the Celsius prize for best science fiction novel with her book “Róndola”, a blend of fantasy, feminism and, above all, humour. Rhei tells the haphazard tale of Hervea, who inherits one of three kingdoms described in the book, after spending most of her life in the “High School of Sewing for Unsmirched Damsels”.

Javier Azpeitia

Finally, for those who like historical novels, the 2017 Espartaco (“Spartacus”) prize went to “El Impresor de Venecia” (The Venetian Printer) by Javier Azpeitia. The printer in question is Aldus Pius Manutius, a Renaissance figure who is not only credited with inventing the italic type and the modern use of the semi-colon, but also of being a humanist who published previously inaccessible works by classic Greek authors.

By Martin Roberts in Gijón

READ MORE: Swedish crime novelist Ekbäck writes women back in history

HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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