The Admunsen Papers. This is the title of the unpublished novel by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán that Navona will publish in the autumn. Two days ago, when the news broke, Ernest Folch, the publisher of the label, told La Vanguardia that “it is one of the most important literary events of recent years.” However, he preferred to reserve the title of the work for closer to the date of publication. Of course, he advanced that, initially, the idea was to preserve the one that the Barcelona writer put in the document that he presented to the Brief Library. An award that, by the way, he did not win.
If the forecasts do not change in these coming months, The Admunsen Papers will be the title of the author’s first novel, as detailed in the inventory that the Library of Catalonia made of the Manuel Vázquez Montalbán collection in 2022 and which has been public since then on their website.
Little is known about the plot, beyond the details provided by Navona – who yesterday did not want to delve into the discovery – in a press release, which specified that it is “a novel narrated in the first person, in which that the protagonist is clearly an alter ego of the author himselfâ€. It is unknown for now if the creator of The South Seas was inspired by the Norwegian explorer of the polar regions Roald Amundsen – the same letters, but reversed – to name his protagonist or if it is a mere coincidence.
“The similarity between the two is undeniable, although this is something that the researcher José Colmeiro will be able to better respond to, since this is not our job,” says Eugènia Serra, director of the Biblioteca de Catalunya. She refers to the researcher at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and specialist in Pepe Carvalho’s father who notified the family that an unpublished work was found in the fund they donated to the institution in 2016.
Information that was already detailed in the inventory that the Library delivered to the family and published on its website, but that went unnoticed. “What I can say is that it was Colmeiro who warned us about the discovery. He called me for coffee and told me about it. Whether or not it was specified in the documents is something I don’t really know, but it would certainly have been interesting to receive a callâ€, says Daniel Vázquez.
Colmeiro also had a copy of the documentation in July 2022 and, in September, with the pandemic already on the decline, he traveled to Barcelona to consult the fund. He “he Informed us by mail that he was preparing an edition of GalÃndez and asked permission to consult the archive at the Library. And so he did. We do not know if he knew or not that this work was among the boxes. I imagine that it was while he was digging around to search for documentation that he came across the manuscript and for this reason he called it a find, â€says Serra.
The library director admits that “we do not specifically inform the family of this, although we do provide them with the inventory. When we got the bottom of it, we started the ordering and description. We don’t have that look of discovering things. Of course, what we analyze we try to date. And we did that, because we delimited the document between 1962 and 1965â€.
The Biblioteca de Catalunya recalls that the novel was exhibited at the institution between April and early July of last year, during a sample with which it was held to thank the family for the donation, although it “went unnoticed.” The exhibition is recorded on the web. “That does not mean that the work is unpublished and that we are all waiting for it to reach bookstores. If we want to promote something, it is its diffusionâ€, concludes Serra.
