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Leonardo Padura, 2023 BCNegra Pepe Carvalho Award

2023-02-06T16:14:04.242Z


The Cuban author, creator of the Mario Conde series and great narrator of the reality of his country, receives recognition from the Barcelona festival for a career


In 1989, when Leonardo Padura (Havana, 67 years old) was struggling with the daily life of journalism in Cuba as he began to outline the fictional character that has marked his career, he could not imagine that the world was going to change forever, few months later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Neither, that this literary career, still in the making, was going to grant him great recognition.

The last one, this Monday afternoon, when he was awarded the BNegra Pepe Carvalho Award for his entire career, an award from a festival that is celebrating its eighteenth edition and that has been won in recent editions by Don Winslow, Juan Madrid, Joyce Carol Oates or Claudia Piñeiro, who has been in charge of announcing it.

Padura, who this afternoon paid homage to his friend Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and has highlighted "the irrefillable hole" that his death left in Spanish culture, has summoned readers to the speech he will give on Thursday, when he collects the award at one of the central acts of BCNegra, words that he already has written on “six double-spaced pages” because, he joked, he is a “very disciplined” man.

The Cuban author published the first novel starring Mario Conde in 1991. It was titled

Pasado perfecto

, the opening chapter of a tetralogy that marked a turning point in Spanish crime crime literature.

Carried out by a policeman who does not want to be one, or who does not know how to be one at the service of power, the series shows us, in "squalid and moving novels" like the ones that the Count himself would like to write, Havana in 1989 through some plots solid police stories and an unforgettable cast of characters.

This is how the author defined in

Water Everywhere

, his book of reflections on his work and literature, the relationship of his characters with a city in which he continues to live.

“My characters are, like me, from Havana.

Some, although they do not admit it, are actually mantilleros.

And they are almost always people clinging to their origin, to their circumstances, to their time, to their city.

Guys who suffer from insularity but who, at the same time, wallow in it and who, if they have to leave, feel split: one of their halves leaves, the other stays”.

More information

The BCNegra festival celebrates its coming of age by investigating the dark side of the human being

These novels tell of a world in turmoil, life in 1989 in a country that has occupied a place in recent history well above its geopolitical influence or size.

“My generation grew up in the midst of the revolution, they participated in it, but when they reached their moment of maturity, of reaping the fruits, in the early 1990s, they saw the Soviet Union fall and everything fall apart.

To this process was also added access to information that we did not have before.

All this generated a commotion that I have been able to transfer to my novels, but always starting from the characters, ”he explained in an interview in EL PAÍS.

Padura has frequented the story, the memories, the journalistic report and other hybrid works such as

The novel of my life

, but it is in his black series, it is through the gaze and vicissitudes of Mario Conde, that this intense historical evolution is best reflected in everyday life.

The author of

Herejes

received the Princess of Asturias Award in 2015, an award that John Banville (Benjamin Black when he is the author of the series on the forensic pathologist Quirke) had received a year earlier, and in 2018 Fred Vargas in a sample of the strength of a genre that has one of its best representatives in Padura.

After the

Tetralogy of the Four Seasons

, as these first four novels are known, he takes a time jump to the present for the other five that complete the cycle for the moment.

The last one,

Decent People

(Tusquets, like the entire series) is the best reflection of the vitality of a character, Mario Conde, already in the annals of the genre, and of a group of novels circumscribed to Havana but with a universal scope.

Mario Conde is 62 years old and has aged physically and mentally.

It's 2016, it's been almost three decades since he's been a police officer, an occupation to which he dedicated "the barbarity of 10 years" and survives by selling second-hand books (or anything of value).

He continues to carry his “historical pessimism”, his lucidity to interpret life, but also trapped, as his friend Carlos el Flaco reminds him, “between the pain of the present and the fear of the future”.

First with

Heretics

and then with

The Transparency of Time

, Padura undertook a change in style in which the historical part gained ground and the number of pages increased considerably.

In

Decent People

that new purpose reaches its best expression, which bodes well for the future of Conde's series.

Outside of criminality, he is the author of

The Man Who Loved Dogs

(Tusquets), a novel about the assassination of Trotsky at the hands of Ramón Mercader, a work of more than 20 years of investigation in which the author became a detective for complete a fictional story full of reality, a novel in which everyone lies, a literary monument.

A lover of the game of ball (baseball) since he was a child, he has a novel about his great passion pending and he assures that if his readers have not enjoyed it yet, it is because he has not discovered “how to do it”.

"I think that Cuba can tell its history without talking about its writers, its painters or its gastronomy, but it cannot do it without talking about its musicians or its baseball players," he commented to this newspaper to reflect the great passion of he.

The award honors Pepe Carvalho by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, an essential character in the history of the Mediterranean crime novel, a lucid analyst of the reality of his time, a unique character, a particular sense of fidelity, a different look at life.

Surely, like their creators, Carvalho and Conde would have been good friends.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2023-02-06

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