The Buenos Aires Quintet

For many years, Argentina was convulsed by the "Dirty Little War" in which the Army and the Right-Wing Business Oligarchy, 'disappeared' 30,000 people. Most of them were 'lefties' or 'radishes' (radicals) who were tortured, had their children taken away and many were thrown out of helicopters flying over the Atlantic (murder, funeral, burial, all in one). Years later, those who survived are still looking for their stolen children. Most have been brought up by the same people who killed their parents and friends. Montalban has taken this story and turned it into a comedic-tragedy. Spending almost as much time cooking, eating and listening to 'tango music' as he does trying to hunt down his cousin. His cousin had escaped to Spain, but after twenty years has gone back to look for his daughter. As in all his books, Montalban has taken time to spread out his theories and polemics as he sees them affecting modern Spain and Argentina. For Pepe Carvalho, had started out as a communist, became a CIA spy and then a private detective. He is a gourmet who will cook just for the joy of making food and then throw it away uneaten. He burns books by authors he feels have said nothing or to much. Like all Montalban's books, it is a incidental treasure trove of historical and literary 'bon mots' (this one has many paeans to Jorge Luis Borges). In the end the mystery is why bother with the mysteries and just turn this one into a travelogue. Zeb Kantrowitz (Note: for those who have read the previous translations of the Carvalho stories, you will find a different feel to this story as opposed to those by Ed Emery. I for one miss his ability to make Montalban shine.)

I first found out about Manuel Vázquez Montalbán while reading a book by Andrea Camilleri, Italy's most popular living writer, who specializes in literary detective novels. The name of Camilleri's usual protagonist is Commissario Montalbano -- a literary character as famous in modern Italy as Hercule Poirot or Inspector Maigret have been in other times and places. An Italian friend explained that Montalbano's name was an homage to the Spanish writer Vázquez Montalbán, whose work Camilleri greatly admired. And so I became curious about Vázquez Montalban, who, I later discovered, is the most widely-read writer in Spain, and widely popular elsewhere in Europe. Strangely enough, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán is little-known in the United States, which is a shame, because his books are excellent. Riddled with Spanish (more properly, Catalan, since Vázquez Montalbán was from Barcelona) literary, political, and, most famously, culinary references, perhaps they fail to resonate with the average American reader. Montalbán's protagonist, Pepe Carvalho, is a man with a checkered past and a bleak present: once a communist intellectual, jailed during the Franco era, briefly a CIA operative, he has become a private detective with an ex-con assistant and a prostitute girlfriend. His superficial nihilism belies a deeply human man with a deep love for Spanish culture and a soft spot for the underdog. He is a perfect centerpiece for Montalbán's picture of a Spain still deeply scarred from the Franco years. Carvalho's one-time faith in the intellectual and the future has been shattered and replaced by deep connection with the sensual - often represented by food, for Carvalho is an obsessive gourmet -- and the immediate present. It is the mixture of the absurdly funny, the sensual, the literary, and the touching that makes Vazquez Montalban's books successful. Carvalho may take beatings all day during an investigation, come home in middle of the night, cook up an elaborate meal, described in such vivid, almost sexual detail by Vázquez Montalbán that the reader feels that he or she could -- must! -- head to the kitchen immediately to recreate it, and pound upon his neighbor's door at 4 AM to wake him up and share the repast with a carefully-chosen bottle of wine, during which his neighbor Fuster, a Latin scholar, makes classical literature references and critiques the cuisine. Buenos Aires Quintet is the most ambitious, funny, touching, and ultimately fulfilling, Montalbán I have read yet. Transplant Pepe to an Argentina also scarred from its years of dictatorship, where he goes in search of his missing cousin. "Tango, Maradona, the disappeared," he jokingly says on arrival when asked what he knows about Argentina. Ironically, these themes - and a parade of comic, often sympathetic and sometimes tragic characters - wind their ways through the book. I don't want to spoil the book by revealing too much. Just buy it and enjoy the romp.