Eduardo Mendoza

Esta es probablemente mi novela favorita de Mendoza —aunque, si soy sincero, casi siempre termina siéndolo la última que leo—. La combinación de su humor ácido, esos diálogos aparentemente incongruentes pero afiladísimos, el ambiente de la transición española y las peculiaridades de su innominado detective representan lo mejor del autor.

Un texto muy divertido en el que Mendoza realiza una brillante sátira de la época. Por estrambótico que parezca, es fácil identificarse con el narrador y sus cuitas, pero resulta imposible no reír con sus peripecias y desastres.

Second adventure of Mendoza's anonymous "detective", who is once again busted out of the lunatic asylum by Inspector Flores to help the police in some extracurricular activities. This time it's an apparently simple courier job, delivering a briefcase full of ransom money, but needless to say it all goes horribly wrong, and our protagonist, acting throughout in the best traditions of the thriller genre, manages to make an already murky situation hopelessly confused, aided and abetted by a show more beautiful-but-unemployed actress and an elderly man in pyjamas. Along the way he has to adopt multiple disguises and deal with a corrupt theatrical agency and a sinister multinational olive-stuffing cartel, whilst the grand finale is a superbly over-the-top Ian Fleming parody.

Don't look for any logic in the plot: it's all tied together with nothing more than the power of narrative inevitability, and we are even less sure at the end of the book than we were at the beginning whether there was ever a mystery to be solved. But that's not the point: it's all gloriously entertaining, and the freedom it gives Mendoza to invent ridiculous situations pays off. show less

The first adventure of Mendoza's unnamed protagonist, who finds himself temporarily released from the asylum to investigate a series of disappearances from Barcelona's most distinguished girls' boarding school. Lots of entertaining spoof gothic fun with secret passages and fainting young women in nightgowns, and a satirical undercurrent in which we are shown how little things have changed with the recent transition from Francoism to democracy. The pace is rather manic, with all the show more traditional elements of the noir detective story - turned on their heads, naturally - packed into two or three hectic days. Mendoza says in his foreword to the recent reprints that he wrote the book on a whim and without any real plan, in the space of a single week of effort that must have been almost as hectic as the action of the story. And he clearly had a lot of fun doing it! show less