I have two reviews of novels in Spanish for you today, one from Spain, the other Argentina. Both for Women in Translation month, the Pineiro is also book 19 of my Twenty Books of Summer. July and August used to be Reading Spain and Portugal month hosted by Stu – so I’m keeping this up informally.
Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet
Translated by Richard Village
This was one of my recent discoveries from Foundry Editions, no 5 in their catalogue and translated by the publisher’s founder. He has also translated another of Llovet’s novels, Sánchez which, having read Spanish Beauty, I am keen to get to – it’s on the shelf!
Spanish Beauty is set in Benidorm, where Michaela is a cop. She has a English gangster father and Flamenco dancer mother. It’s not a surprise to discover right from the start, that she is one of the shadiest cops you’ll ever encounter, always with a deal on the side, an ear to the underbelly of the costa town…
Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of sick, pissing against walls, and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. Chlamydia. And the sea. Like the desert of the Levant, of the West, of Las Vegas, shadows of skyscrapers on the beach, reaching higher and higher, shadows that go on for miles, stretching over the surface of the lukewarm sea at ten at night whilst families eat fried chicken on the shore, Mediterranean steel Godzillas on the cold dawn sand.
Throughout the novel, Michaela is on the hunt for two things. Her father has gone AWOL, but her main obsession is acquiring Reggie Kray’s Dunhill lighter! We’ll discover why she wants it later on.
The Dunhill Rollagas lighter is iconic – introduced in the late 1950s with various finishes and still available today if you have £1050 to spare for the silver-plated version. An old boyfriend of mine had one (as did James Bond). It was discreetly heavy for its compact size and always reliable – a lovely thing.
Digression over! Over the course of the rest of the novel, we’ll meet a host of characters including Michaela’s father Kyle.
The interview with Terry B., ReggieKray’s cellmate, third-rate delinquent and Tube station pickpocket, who ended up living in Beniform and was what had brought Kyle here to the Pearl of the Costa Blanca in the Olympic year, 1976.
Kyle and Terry B. got to know each other one April in the Mars, a bar on one of the flights of steps in the old town. Terry B. was small and wiry, low-maintenance, one of those people who eats once a day and sleeps one night a week. When he was drunk. He told stories about Reggie. When he was sober too. It was his big topic, his life’s mission.
MIchaela is increasingly world-weary these days, as she goes through Kyle’s flat, having located where he was staying, looking for something, in philosophical mood.
In Benidorm ambitions are in line with the small scale of the crime: half-arsed drug dealing, scams, punch-ups. Get-rich-quick urban development and sleazy local politics if you want to think big. Nothing else. That’s all we’ve got. We don’t make history any longer. We make sangria.
I can’t say too much more about what happens, except that the Russian mafia gets involved when an oligarch playboy rents a huge villa and throws a party. Will she find her missing father? Will the lighter turn up? I couldn’t possibly say.
Michaela is up to all kinds of naughtiness which she largely gets away with, which contrasts strongly with Fabio in Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos – the first book in his wonderful Marseilles Trilogy; Fabio being a good guy cop. However, like Izzo’s Marseilles, Benidorm itself also gets a starring role in the novel, there is a strong sense of place, particularly the town’s underbelly contrasting with the oligarch’s villa on the hills outside. The supporting cast of low-lifes and her absent father add more colour
As you’ll read from the quotes above, there is a dark humor to this noir, which made it an absolute delight to read. My second hit from Foundry Editions after Cécile Tlili last month. See also Stu’s review (we managed to pick the same first opening quote!).
Spanish Beauty – own copy. Foundry Editions flapped paperback, 151 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.
All Yours by Claudio Piñeiro
Translated by Miranda France
This was Argentinian author Piñeiro’s second novel, first published in 2006, following hot on the heels of her first, Thursday Night Widows the year before, both crime, and both translated by Miranda France.
Set in Buenos Aires, All Yours is narrated by Inés, she’s been married to Ernesto for yonks and they have a daughter, Lali, It’s fair to say their relationship is lacking in intimacy at the moment, but she’s sure he still loves her, that is, until she makes a discovery…
I was looking around for a pen one day, and since I couldn’t find one, I opened his briefcase and there it was: a love heart, drawn in lipstick, with the words, “All Yours” across it, and signed “your true love”. Pretty corny stuff, but the truth is that at that moment I felt very hurt. My instinct was to throw it in his face, to say “What is this.you piece of shit?!” Fortunately, I chose instead to count to ten, took a deep breath – and did nothing at all. It was hard keeping up a front over dinner.
When he gets a call, and has to go out to work to reboot the system, she senses it’s a lie, and follows him to a wood by the lake – where, hiding in the trees she witness him having a argument with his secretary, Alicia. He pushed her and she fell, hitting her head on a tree trunk – and just lilke that she was dead.
I didn’t know what to do; I couldn’t exactly step out from behind the tree and say “shall I give you a hand, Ernesto?”
So I went home. It seemed the most sensible thing to do.
Eventually Ernesto confesses to Inés that he sank the body in the middle of the lake. The search for Alicia has not turned anything up yet, but her family are on the news constantly. Inés provides Ernesto with an alibi. But you know the body will turn up eventually, and then it’ll be curtains for Ernesto unless Inés is clever, but then she makes a discovery, and with this twist, her plans change completely…
Interspersed between Inés’ short chapters are even shorter ones taking the form of conversations between Lali and her friends. She’s oblivious to her parents’ problems – for she has some of her own, I can say no more. Also included in italics are a few texts Inés has been researching on forensics and bodies, submitted as evidence when things go pear-shaped.
This was a quick read and so enjoyable. There is a lot of humour, and there is nothing like a woman scorned to stir up revenge. What fun! It was more comedic than the other of her crime novels I’ve read (Betty Boo, 2011) which was a police procedural with a journalistic flair and more hard-boiled; and quite different to her later novels (A Little Luck, 2023) where she’s gone down a relationship drama path. However, once a crime writer, always a crime writer, and Piñeiro has returned to Inés years later in 2024’s Time of the Flies, which is on my shelves – I can’t wait to see what she did next.
Source: Own copy. Bitter Lemon paperback, 172 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.
