8432086118

8432086118

review of
Manuel Vazquez Montalban's The Angst-Ridden Executive
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 31, 2015

To read the full review, please go here:

"Franco is dead! THANK GOODNESS!":
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/403587-franco-is-dead-thank-goodness

Ever since I read Montalban's The Buenos Aires Quintet (my review's here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/382361-don-t-let-them-get-away?chapter=1 ) I've been hoping I'd find something else by him in used bk stores &, Lo & Behold!, I finally did in my favorite PGH bookshop last wk. What a treat! I'm in the midst of reading Wyndham Lewis's The Childermass wch is excellent so far but I was glad to get a break from it for Montalban.

According to the brief bio in the Quintet: "Born in Barcelona in 1939, MANUEL VASQUEZ MONTALBAN (1939-2003) was a member of Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC), and was jailed by the Franco government for four years for supporting a miners' strike." His obviously substantial political know-how made the Quintet of deep interest to me & works just as well in Executive.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco was dictator of Spain from 1939 to his death in 1975. He was the main military leader to overthrow the republic in the Spanish Civil War. This bk was originally published in 1977, 2 yrs after Franco's death, & much of it centers around post-Franco conditions in Barcelona.

I was in Barcelona in 1978. There were nervous looking teenagers in uniform standing around w/ machine-guns. It wasn't exactly an atmosphere to inspire confidence & relaxation. I left the next day.

I went to Madrid in 1984. By that time, Madrid, at least, seemed almost like a paradise. People seemed very, VERY glad that the dictator was dead. News kiosks had displays of bks by Gertrude Stein, William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, & Philip K. Dick. At least that's the way I remember it now. I was told that people were openly having sex in the parks.

I went to a restaurant w/ a friend where a diverse crowd of people, a gay couple in black leather, an ordinary family, old women in lace, etc, etc, all sat around eating great food & drinking & joking w/ each other. It was one of the friendliest & most accepting environments I'd ever witnessed. As I recall, I got a huge plate of paella & a bottle of red wine for something like $2. The bars had good beer for something like a nickel & the tapas were free. The one good thing about Franco was how happy people were when he died.

The dedication of this bk is as follows: "One day the member of parliament Sole Barbera asked me: "When are you going to write another of your cops and robbers novels?" I have taken him at his word, and would like to dedicate The Angst-Ridden Executive to him." (p 5) 'Naturally', I had to ask: Who is/was Sole Barbera?: ..&, y'know what?, I didn't find Sole Barbera on the internet. Fancy that. Not even in Spanish.

The Angst-Ridden Executive is basically about Spain transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. When it was written, Spain was in great turmoil.

"'And this is quiet compared with some places, boss. Imagine what things must be like in Bilbao. Or San Sebastian. Or Madrid. The ETA and GRAPO kidnapping people all over the place. The right-wing firing at demonstrators. And the shoot-out at the lawyers' office. That way they're hoping to destablicize the situation.'

"'Destabilize, Biscuter.'

"'What does "destabilize" mean, boss?'

"'Creating a scenario in which the authorities lose control of the situation, and the political system is incapable of guaranteeing order.'

"'And who benefits from this?'

"'Invariably those in power. It gives them an alibi for doing what the hell they want.'" - pp 85-86

Montalban is careful to incriminate both leftist & rightist groups here. I find "'And who benefits from this?'" to be a little out-of-character coming out of Biscuter's mouth but it gives the author the opportunity to say his piece. Think of the burning of the Reichstag & how it assisted w/ the nazi rise to power. Think of the 9/11 attacks & the way it led to a justification of defenestrating civil liberties.

Montalban surprised me by having his recurring protagonist detective, Carvalho, be in the CIA:

"He'd not so much as requested as demanded a window seat. The girl at the Western Air Lines check-in desk looked at the card he flashed, and complied, albeit with an air of puzzlement.

"What reason could there possibly be for a CIA agent to insist on a window seat on a flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco? The girl had heard rumours about special training camps that were supposedly located somewhere in the Mojave Desert, but surely the CIA had their own reconnaissance planes." - p 7

Carvalho in the CIA?! Tell me it ain't so!! Former CIA agent Philip Agee lost his US citizenship by writing & publishing his exposé of the CIA entitled Inside the Company: CIA Diary in 1975. Jeffrey Steinberg, the 1st publisher of the bk, of Stonehill Press died in a suspicious car explosion on May 23, 1981. To quote my own 1984 article on the subject, "The Suspicious Death of Jeffrey Steinberg, Stonehill Press Publisher":

"Inside the Company was an important breakthrough in exposing the actualities of US covert assassinations, misinformation, overthrows, etc as contrasted with the public relations version of US government scruples."

Perhaps Montalban didn't know about Agee's bk when he had Carvalho as a CIA agent - wch must've happened in an earlier bk than this one &, therefore, might've been before Agee's public revelations.

"'Don't you know that it's against the law for a Spanish citizen to enrol in organizations like the CIA without authorization?'

"'I started off giving Spanish lessons, not realizing that it was the CIA. Then I found it amusing, so I carried on. When I left, I clarified my position with two ministries — Foreign Affairs, and the Home Office.'" - p 166

Given Montalban's socialist background, there's more than a little humor to passages like the following:

"[']The only thing that worries me is the idea of a crisis looming, and my having to start acting like a foreman. You know what I mean?'

"'You have the morality of a pinko.'" - p 11

Using the populist tool of detective fiction, what Montalban does is give an analysis of hidden possibilities in Spain's political transitioning & show how an observer might go about systematically researching something inspired by the methodology rendered thru the literary vehicle of his detective character.

"'What does Petnay make?'

"'Perfumes, alcoholic spirits and pharmaceutical products.'

"The German seemed inclined to stop there. Jauma, however, continued the list.

"'Fighter planes, bombers, high-tech communications systems, all highly "sophisticated", as they say...as well as newspapers, magazines, dailies, politicians, and revolutionaries... Petnay makes them all.[']" - pp 22-23

Throughout it all, Franco recurs again & again as a subject of great rancor amongst Spaniards: "'It was only women and good food that saved us all from going mad under Franco.'" (p 23) For those of you w/ short-term memories only &/or little or no understanding of 20th century Spanish history, keep in mind that Franco was dictator for 36 yrs, that he was responsible for concentration camps & the deaths of 100s of 1,000s of people, that he heavily suppressed a popular elected republic, etc, etc.. For such underinformed readers, the author doesn't allow one to forget. Hatred of Franco runs deep here:

"'He's on the way out. He's very ill, poor thing.'

"'He seems well, considering.'

"The wife gave him a look she'd copied from her husband.

"'It's his character. It's his stamina that keeps him going. I think the only reason he's lived this long is because he wanted Franco to die first.'" - p 139

At 1st, in a foreshadowing scene of central importance, Franco isn't dead yet: "By now Rhomberg was sufficiently drunk not to feel embarrassed. He gave three cheers for socialism and drank to the forthcoming downfall of Franco." (p24) Most of the action in the novel takes place a few yrs later after Franco's death.

A recurring fictional character is the fictional detective's employee/friend/cook:

"From the end of Carvalho's sentence to the present day, Biscuter had been in and out of prison many times. He'd been cured of his passion for stealing cars, but his record stuck with him. He would occasionally fall foul of a police round-up, and being unemployed, would find himself charged under the Vagrant Persons Act.

"'If only I could find a job...'

"'How would you fancy working for me? You'd be in charge of a small office. You'll make me a coffee or a potato tortilla every now and then, but apart from that your time's your own.'" - p 32

While there's plenty of sexual stereotyping in Montalban's bks & more explicit sex than there wd've been in Montalban's predecessor writers like Hammett & Chandler ("Charo devoted herself to a detailed foreplay that lasted the entire drive back. Having arrived home, Carvalho made his way, naked, down the darkened hallway of his apartment, and his cock was warmly welcomed, first by her lips and then by her tongue, as it pressed hard against her teeth and her mouth opened to make way for it." - p 170), what's particularly interesting to me is that Carvalho's 'secretary' is not an attractive young woman, as wd've been the case w/ the earlier novelists, but is, instead, an older, somewhat decrepit male ex-con who the detective likes & is trying to help out. On 2nd thought, it's not really that far from the supporting characters in Hammett's "Thin Man" stories.

"At university Pedro Paraa had been known as 'Colonel' Para. He'd been obsessed with the idea of setting up an anti-fascist resistance movement in the mountains." - p 33

&, in fact, there were armed resistance groups called the "Maquis" operating out of the Spanish mountains that were active from the loss of the Civil War in 1939 up 'til at least 1952 if not longer. Consider these excerpts from "Armed resistance to Franco, 1939-1965" by Antonio Téllez:

"Very little has been written about the scale of the armed struggle against Franco following the civil war. It was and still is known to few. A thick blanket of silence has been drawn over the fighters, for a variety of reasons. According to Franco's personal friend Civil Guard Lieutenant-General Camilo Alonso Vega - who was in charge of the anti-guerrilla campaign for twelve years - banditry (the term the Francoists always used to describe the guerrilla activity) was of "great significance" in Spain, in that it "disrupted communications, demoralised folk, wrecked our economy, shattered our unity and discredited us in the eyes of the outside world”.

"Only days before those words were uttered General Franco himself had excused the blanket silence imposed on reports of armed opposition and the efforts mounted to stop it, when he had stated that "the Civil Guard's sacrifices in the years following the Second World War were made selflessly and in silence, because, for political and security reasons it was inappropriate to publicise the locations, the clashes, casualty figures or names of those who fell in performance of their duty, in a heroic and unspoken sacrifice."

"This cover-up has continued right up until our own day. In a Spanish Television (TVE) programme entitled Guerrilla Warfare and broadcast in 1984, General Manuel Prieto Lopez cynically referred to the anti-Francoist fighters as bandits and killers. Not that this should come as any surprise - during the period described as the political transition to democracy (November 1975 to October 1982) all political forces, high financiers, industrialists, the military and church authorities decided that references to the past were inappropriate and that the protracted blood-letting of the Franco era should be consigned to oblivion. That consensus holds firm today*, and historians eager to lift that veil run up against insurmountable obstacles when they try to examine State, Civil Guard or Police archives."

[..]

"An example that sums up the mentality and spirit of the guerrilla movement of the time is provided by a small team of Anarchist guerrillas, led by the veteran fighter Francisco Sabate Llopart (El Quico). On their return to Spain after the end of the Second World War one of their first missions was the 'expropriation' of money and valuables in a series of aggravated robberies of local big-businessmen. On completion of 'business', those 'visited' would be left a note like the following one, left at the home of a wealthy big-store owner, Manuel Garriga:

""We are not robbers, we are libertarian resistance fighters. What we have just taken will help in a small way to feed the orphaned and starving children of those anti-fascists who you and your kind have shot. We are people who have never and will never beg for what is ours. So long as we have the strength to do so we shall fight for for the freedom of the Spanish working class. As for you, Garriga, although you are a murderer and a thief, we have spared you, because we as libertarians appreciate the value of human life, something which you never have, nor are likely to, understand."

"A small example of how, despite the loss of the war, and despite the ruthlessness of the fascist repression, those involved in the resistance still managed to maintain their politics, their humanity, and their self-respect." - https://libcom.org/history/1939-1965-armed-resistance-to-franco

I have a Spanish poster for an event honoring the memory of the Maquis that I was fortunate enuf to get from a Spanish anarchist friend displayed in my house. These are people worthy of my respect.

I was pleased to find shades of my own health care philosophy expressed by Biscuter: "[']Look at my brother-in-law. He was feeling a bit rough, so he went to see the doctor. The doctor told him he had cancer. "Don't give me that..." says my brother-in-law. Anyway, three months later he was dead, if you ask me, the reason was just because he knew he had cancer.[']" Ha ha! I'm always saying that my 'cure for cancer' is to not know about it & hope that it kills me quick. I've (almost) made it to 62 so maybe my philosophy isn't a total bust. Live fast, die old. For a taste of my disgust w/ the Kafkaesque protection racket of 'health insurance' in the USA, witness my "HealthCare NightMare" movie here: http://youtu.be/tjB3QBz4LAc .

Reading a Montalban novel cd be an excellent & entertaining educational experience for people willing to pay attn:

"'Rhomberg's indignation reminds me of the eminent geographer Paginal in The Sons of Captain Grant, when he discovers that the British colonial teachers had taught their geography in such a way that the natives believed the whole world was British. The viewpoint of the colonizer and the viewpoint of the colonized. When you work for a big multinational, the world takes on quite different geographical divisions.[']" - p 40

Montalban is careful to explore the various possibilities of character type in the early days of post-Franco Spain: "Nuñez had been a pioneer in the reconstruction of the Left in Barcelona University during the nineteen fifties. After torture, and spells in prison, he had fled to France, where he had embarked on a life that would have made him ideal material for the bureaucracy of his own party, or a doctorate in social science and an assured place in a future democratic Spain. Too cynical to be a bureaucrat and too academic to be an academic, he plumped for the role of an onlooker" (p 53) A part of the reader's 'job' is to decide wch of these characters to trust.

Carvalho moves in a world of criminals & prostitutes. As such, it's a relief to read that he detests pimps: "Carvalho could stomach just about anything, but he drew the line at pimps. For him they were like dog-ticks — loathsome little insects grown fat from feeding on someone else's blood. The athlete had the face of an evil-looking lamb, and the innocence of a micro-electronic computer." (p 67)

It was also a pleasure to see poets in exile get positive play: "While he waited for Parra to return, Carvalho found himself thinking of other poets with unusual jobs. Emilio Prados, in exile, working as a playground supervisor for children in a secondary school in Mexico. Or the poet who ended up teaching infants in a school in Tijuana. Carvalho had met him in a bar at the border, as he was drinking tquila solos, with salt, interspersed with a sip of water and bicarbonate. / 'I'm not coming back,' he had said, 'until Franco's dead. It's a question of dignity. Maybe I am nothing here — but at least I have my pride.[']" (p 72) Montalban is always slipping in details like this that're perfect for inquiring minds like my own. ( )

Well, I read this in English, obviously, but the meal descriptions and references to Spanish history and philosophy outnumber the aspects of the mystery- which was thin enough. ( )

Intimo, cupo, malinconico

i tre aggettivi del titolo rendono tutto il clima del libro. Pepe Carvalho che questa volta ha a che fare con un intrigo misterioso, con la morte di un manager che aveva conosciuto per caso molti anni prima negli Stati Uniti. L'assassinio è ovviamente orchestrato con una messa in scena che cela una verità più scomoda. Il potere dei forti incombe e appesta le vite dei più e di Pepe in un paese che ancora sanguina per le ferite del franchismo. Tra frasi memorabili e fantasmi mai morti la vicenda si svolge lentamente con flashback dell'incontro statunitense fra Pepe e il manager. La matassa si dipana tra mille sofferenze mentali e fisiche. La verità viene a galla fra il disprezzo dei colpevoli e l'impotenza di chi ha aggiunto soltanto un altro tassello alla follia di questo pazzo mondo degli umani.