If there is a singular writer in current Spanish narrative that is JM Guelbenzu. Veteran but always avant-garde, fascinatingly erratic in its transition between genres but always successful in its plots and surprising in that balanced balance between form and substance. Something only typical of the seasoned trade, of the writer accustomed to squeezing his meninges to give his best.
Creator of the judge Mariana de Marco around whom he has composed his own police saga and yet just as interesting in my opinion in his individual works. Because freed from any type of debt, unleashed in his creativity, Guelbenzu exposes characters and also readers to unexpected abysses where as soon as a liberating wind blows, it seems to irrevocably push them to fall. halfway between Camilo José Cela y Ray Loriga, Guelbenzu places himself where he wants, listening to one or the other.
The disturbing duality mentioned above is born from a combination of realism and fantasy that borders on the surrealism that is more capable of explaining what surrounds us. Everything is subjective and everything is credible, from an intimate encounter with the grim reaper from which to emerge victorious to the sensation of the cold or heat of living. The point is to make it all plausible to give us new unforgettable adventures.
Top 3 recommended novels by JM Guelbenzu
In bed with the wrong man
The downside of discovering the inappropriateness of the inhabitant on the other side of your bed is that it is almost always late. The fact of untimely revealing the impostor lover in whatever his deficiency may be wearisome, a feeling of wasted time.
This is how this heroine of modern times arises, determined to overcome her lost time: a naive, romantic and dreamy ill-married from the provinces decides to spoil her life and her traditional marriage just as Spain goes from the mediocre aurea of ​​national Catholicism to freedoms that open the customs and minds of the Spanish.
Errors, stumbles and failures are interspersed with the joys of the body and the naturalness with which it wears winds and tides that carry it aimlessly from one bed to another. But nature is wise with authentic souls, and since naivety is strength in her, she goes through the perverse tricks with which men achieve it like the sun's ray goes through the glass of the nobility of their soul: without breaking or staining it.
Its essential rectitude fights hand to hand (and this expression is never better used) with friends and enemies. The new novel by José MarÃa Guelbenzu, an essential figure in contemporary Spanish literature, once again takes risks with a proposal for a «nonsense novel »In this hilarious roman à clef in the best style of its author: an accurate satire of the habits and customs in the effervescent Madrid of the eighties starring an unforgettable Justine from the provinces.
Murder in the Botanical Garden
A great plot among the exuberance of the Madrid Botanical Garden. A brilliant presentation with that notorious and always satisfactory task of documenting a particular world on which the narrator spreads his imagination to transform reality into an alienating space transmitted to the world as an old-fashioned chronicle of events. Judge Mariana de Maco wins points in a general imaginary of Spanish noir where corruption, revenge and the most varied crimes are mixed...
The body of Concepción Rivera, a middle-aged woman, appears hidden behind a beautiful royal palm in Madrid's Botanical Garden, along with a bouquet of monkshood and a bottle of whiskey. Secretary of the Club de Amigos de los Jardines, made up of a group of colorful gardening enthusiasts, had come to the Garden a few minutes before it closed.
Who was with her and how could she get out without being seen? Nothing suggests that someone close to him could be involved, despite the fact that all the members of the club had the poisonous aconite flower as an ornament. The perceptive judge Mariana de Marco begins the investigation of the case while her sentimental partner, the journalist Javier Goitia, unemployed due to the strong crisis that is plaguing the sector, decides to narrate the investigation in the form of a journalistic chronicle. This fact will confront them in a strange love rivalry that will fester dangerously.
Accepted lies
Nobody accepts the lies. Not even those that one tells oneself throughout life. In a novel like this the lies creak like termites rattle wood.
The overall floorboards are still firm, capable of supporting whatever happens on stage. But the final crashing crash can also end up shaping an unexpected end: Gabriel, a middle-aged television writer, divorced and father of a pre-adolescent son, witnesses a traffic accident that costs a child his life on a Madrid street. Just that same day, the death of the leading actor of Gabriel's hit original series triggers a change in his life.
A short time later, an obscure matter shakes the top of the bank of which the current husband of his ex-wife, Isabel, is a director; It is an affair she embarks on out of ambition and ends up redounding to the benefit of her new lover, a self-made mogul who fulfills all of Isabel's upward mobility ambitions. Gabriel, concerned about his son's education, gropes the possibility of taking custody and custody of the boy to prevent him from being educated in an environment that he considers harmful.
This is the story of a diverse world of people who live in an environment in which reality is confused with convenience, which turns the lives of all of them into a kind of general, accepted and consented lie. There the novel weaves a complex vision of our country, but it is in the figure of Gabriel and in his concern for the future of his son and the moral values ​​that he would like to instill in him, where the weakness and strength of a character are concentrated. He has to live on the insecurity ground that human beings tread at the beginning of the new century.
Other recommended books by José MarÃa Guelbenzu…
Death in first class
In this installment that is around half of the Marco's Marian Saga we enjoy a framework in the style of that Agatha Christie hell-bent on bringing out the wicked side of high society in blood-spattered encounters.
Julia Cruz, a close friend of Judge Mariana de Marco, receives an invitation to attend a luxury cruise on the Nile, one of those trips whose main objective is for influential people to interact with each other. Mariana tries to rebuild after the deep shock after an adventure that has hurt her dignity and mistreated her heart, and Julia decides that a cruise is just what her friend needs. The group of guests on the trip seems to orbit around a central figure , a woman in her sixties named Carmen Montesquinza, whose natural elegance and firmness of character give her a distinction that will immediately catch the attention of the insightful Mariana, who will begin to observe with expectation the movements around the lady.
However, after a memorable evening in which a young woman from the group stars in a scandalous and provocative dance number, Carmen disappears, for no apparent reason, and, despite Julia's insistence, Mariana de Marco will feel unable to detach herself from the group. affair and undertake a solo investigation that will expose a dark family and financial plot.
