With this political thriller against the backdrop of Catalan blackmail and separatism, the Spanish writer signs a semi-dystopia with scathing humor.
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Barcelona, 2025. The mayor of the city, Virginia Oliver, founder of an ultra -conservative and xenophobic party, is the victim of blackmail at the “Sextape”. She risks seeing her privacy unveiled if she does not pay 300,000 euros. Who can blame him? Is it a destabilization maneuver or a simple attempted extortion? In independence, Melchor Marin, the policeman in love with justice, as much renowned for his discretion as for his insight, discovered in Terra Alta (Actes Sud, 2021), investigation into this case.
In this second volume of the trilogy, Javier Cercas confirms his breakup (passenger?) With the genre which devoted it as one of the greatest Spanish writers current: the autobiographical novel and without fiction (the soldiers of Salamis , The impostor, the monarch of shadows…, Actes Sud, 2002, 2015 and 2018), which enabled him to question the conflictual past of Spain – civil war, Francoism, democratic transition.
a caste of privileged
Here, it is the recent history of the country which nourishes most of its story: the “procedure”, this attempt to secession from Catalonia, culminating in 2017, and which left indelible footsteps on the region . Immersing in the middle of the local high bourgeoisie, Cercas tells how a caste of privileged, capable of the worst misdeeds, has managed to maintain itself in power and even precipitated the events that led to the holding of the referendum, deemed illegal, on autonomy.
With a sharp line, he stages a group of three inseparable boys, Casas, Vidal and Rosell, from the most powerful families in Barcelona. In their youth, they drugged girls before raping them and filmed their antics by their comrade Ricky, less nonsense than them. About twenty years later, the same, who remained unpunished, reign supreme over the city and beyond. Casas married the future mayor, Vidal became his first assistant, Rosell, a powerful lobbyist. And Ricky tells.
It is cynicism, excessive ambition, but also violence and corruption specific to these circles, marked by the collusion between money and politics, that Cercas describes here, sometimes to caricature. In independence, the suspense prevails less than the analysis of a regionalist movement which flirts with populism. The return to a certain moral order and the withdrawal of identity in the face of the pseudo-menace of a “great replacement” take their source in the climate of fear that this policy fiction describes.
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