The novels that Ferran Torrent (SedavÃ, 1951) has published in recent years make you think of a village bar or casino where everyone knows each other. At a separate table are Butxana and Commissioner Tordera. On the central marble table the Mythic Regino – forger -, Messié – criminal -, Llargo, el Gordo, el Gitano and Sara, the couple who take care of the residence for marginals that has been set up by Father Rafel, priest of left Ferran Torres with his friend Marc – the two alter egos of Torrent – ​​are at the bar where they order beers.
There are also passers-by: some boyfriends who painted graffiti in the village cemetery on the day they were to bury the fascist mayor there, agents of the Political-Social Brigade and the Criminal Police who cannot be seen, an importer of wood from Guinea with a communist daughter, Mossad spies and even Elmyr de Hory, the famous art forger, star of Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973).
There is the atmosphere of the casino: time passes calmly, no one is in a hurry. To say that Joan, Miquel and Ramon prepare a paint bucket and a brush, paint the facade and decide what to do with the compromising materials takes up seven pages of a book. Before getting into the subject, Torrent explains to the reader the virtues of the very productive variety of oranges called staca, and the mistrust between farmers and agronomic engineers. Once explained, the boys arrive, now one, now the other. On the third page they write the first letter of the painting. And what happens with the graffiti episode happens a little with everything: Torrent’s books have become slow, baroque.
Many scenes are needed to get to the bone pier, for example in relation to the main theme: the network of theft, forgery and replacement of paintings linked to the looting of works of art from Jewish families in Nazi Germany . And even more to link this plot with the other: Joan’s bad step in a demonstration against the dictatorship that ends with a police crime.
To complete the game of baroque mirrors there is a correspondence between the history of the 1960s and the characters and situations of today: the band that lives in Father Rafel’s residence has so much income in B that they don’t know what to do with it. Torrent takes the opportunity to introduce a topical plot around black money, tax havens – increasingly controlled – and new countries to hide the money: Equatorial Guinea, Cape Verde, where the masters of the world are preparing left-wing revolutions. He takes the opportunity to explain that, when he was promoting the Valencian Community to the world, during the time of the PP, Julio Iglésias was paid in a tax haven. And introduces a plot around the eavesdropping on the Generalitat Valenciana. There is always humor. Neus, head of the Cabinet of the Presidency of the Generalitat, asks Marc (who knows her from when they worked together at the newspaper) to put her in touch with Messié. He wants them to comb the offices to find out if there are microphones and if their emails are diverted. They send a hacker there who is dedicated to diverting wiretaps and emails to Messié’s organization. Once the information is stolen, comes the disillusionment: there is no engaging, juicy, exploitable conversation from the criminal’s perspective – they spend the day talking about underfunding!
Torrent scatters threads of history – Franco’s police, Gestapo instructors, Chinese mobsters, Andorran contacts – and when you think the head has gotten too big, he starts tying heads together and the novel is closed and convincing. In the background, there are always the same big questions: chance, badness, the sense of Justice above the Law, and Robinhoodesque theft as a way to restore the balance of the distribution of wealth.
I have to say that the title, Memoirs of Myself, had made me think of a more personal, not so constructed, biographical book. I hope that Torrent will give us such a book.
