This Wednesday they are fulfilled 20 years since the premature death of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán at the Bangkok airport. And as happens with the messages that are put inside a bottle and thrown into the sea without a predetermined destination, chance has wanted that just now an unpublished and totally unpublished novel arrives on the sand of our beach (that is, in the bookstores). Unexpectedly, for many, the best chronicler of late Francoism and the Transition. Quite a literary event that It is titled ‘The Admusen Papers’ and is edited by Navona.
The story of its discovery, announced last April, is the result of luck but above all of research. The manuscript was found by the professor of Hispanic Philology at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and an expert in Montalbán’s work. Jose Colmeiro, who found it among the papers that the family deposited in 2016 in the National Library of Catalonia. It happened while I was researching the archives for a reissue of ‘Galíndez’ that has also just been published.
There was hardly any material in the boxes from the 60s and it appeared A three-ink manuscript, corrected by hand and bound, set off alarm bells. Then came covid and the consequent stoppage. The last year has been dedicated to the revision and editing of what is the first novel that Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote when he was, according to experts, between 24 and 26 years old.
Time travel
“No one knew anything, neither the family, those close to him nor his agent. But from the first moment I saw the enormous importance of that,” recalls Colmeiro, who sees the discovery as “a fascinating black box of the writer, which advances in embryonic form the concerns, themes and obsessions“. For his son, the writer Daniel Vázquez Sallés, it was also a very special surprise. “It’s like meeting your father at 24 years old., one of the things that has excited me the most” since in 2019 he became responsible for keeping his father’s legacy alive, he acknowledges. Reading it was like “travel in a time machineto the past”.
The novel, of about 450 pages, is a portrait of clandestine life in Franco’s Spain in the 60s. It stars a writer who has just been released from prison and ends up in an advertising agency, the only place where he is allowed to write. Something similar happened to Montalbán, who was sentenced for his anti-Francoism to three years in prison for “rebellion by equalization” of which he served 18 months, the first in the Model and the rest in the Lleida prison, in 1962, where he requested the transfer.
Prison, second university
When leaving, pursued by the Franco censorshiphad to turn to furniture magazines (one of his pseudonyms was ‘Jack the decorator’) to continue writing without arousing too much suspicion because he was closely watched. As Colmeiro explains, his time in prison was like a second university, “a very productive time” which he shared with Salvador Clotas, Martín Capdevida and Ferran Fullá. He wrote two collections of poems, numerous stories, ‘Information Report’, he learned Italian and it is likely that he started ‘The Admunsen Papers’, whose title is a nod to the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsenfamous for leading the expedition to Antarctica that discovered the South Pole, an adventurer with whom he had a fascination since he was a child. His wife, Anna Sallés i Bonastrealso spent six months in jail, as a plaque in La Modelo recalls.
Leiden-Barcelona
The novel is set in the Dutch city of Leiden to avoid the censor, but the descriptions of places like the Fira, the Raval neighborhood or the port portray Barcelona in the 60s. “It is a brave book, which portrays the clandestine fight against Francoism and it is at the same time very modern, it already points out a criticism of the patriarchal and consumer society,” says Colmeiro. “I think he would be very happy if we could read him now, without the prejudices of the time,” he adds.
For Vázquez Sallés, the novel is “very bright and colorful” and tremendously modern, with classic Montalbanian elements such as “intrigue, political struggle, memory and experimental literature”. The figure of Admunsen, who functions as his first alter ego, is that of “an antihero, a loser, “a frustrated young writer who cannot publish,” something that reflects his own experience as a journalist who was prevented from practicing because he was not affiliated with the Movement. Movies and songs of the time parade through the book in a collage-like portrait that has a lot to do with the cover of the book, a painting by Equipo Crónica titled ‘Pim-Pam-Pop’.
A defeat and a secret
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One of the mysteries surrounding the manuscript found has to do with a handwritten note on the first page, which states that Montalbán submitted the novel to the Brief Library Award. He didn’t win it and he never spoke to anyone about the novel again, not even his family. But he did not destroy the manuscript, as he usually did with the papers that he was not interested in keeping. He proofread the novel meticulously and put it away. The name of the writer, critic and editor appears crossed out on the first page Josep Maria Castellet, then jury of the award, and the address of his home, Provença, 275.
Presumably he sent it first to him and then to the prize, where it did not prosper, and then he made corrections and put it in a drawer for decades. Knowing all the details of the story is “work for a future doctoral student,” proposes Colmeiro, a good connoisseur of the legacy, which has yet to be fully inventoried and where there is, above all, abundant correspondence and letters with characters like Sara Montiel. More unpublished? “Except for a collection of poems that disappeared on a Greek beach in ’74, I don’t know of any more unpublished works by my father,” says his son. Time and researchers will tell.