Novel
Southern Seas
Los mares del Sur
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán · 1979
Synopsis
Barcelona, 1979. Carlos Stuart Pedrell, a rich property developer and patron of artists, fascinated by Gauguin, was supposed to have been travelling in Oceania for a year. He is found stabbed to death on a patch of waste ground in a peripheral district of the city. Through the family lawyer, Viladecans, his widow hires the private detective Pepe Carvalho, a disillusioned gourmet who burns books, not to find the culprit but to learn where this man spent the year he never lived in Polynesia, and what business he was caught up in.
Context
The novel appeared in 1979 and at once won the Planeta Prize; it brought its author and his detective wide fame. It is Carvalho's fourth case, and the detective plot counts for less in it than the portrait of a city in the midst of transition. The French translation by Michèle Gazier appeared in 1980 under the title Marquises, si vos rivages, before being reissued since the late eighties under the title Les Mers du Sud. In English, Patrick Camiller translated it under the title Southern Seas.
Who it is for
A detective novel in which the investigation matters less than the city and its milieux; meals take up a great deal of space.
Prizes and reception
Planeta Prize in 1979, Grand Prix de littérature policière in France in 1981; chosen by El Mundo among the hundred best novels in Spanish of the twentieth century.