Barcelona (EFE).- The Madrid writer Rosa Montero returns to crime novels with the work “La desconocida”, written in four hands with the French writer and journalist Olivier Truc, which, at the initiative of the Quais du Polar festival of the French police genre, takes place between Barcelona and Lyon.
In the presentation of the book, published in Spain by Alfaguara, he explained that when he received the commission for Quais du Polar, he could not say no and also already knew Olivier Truc, with whom he shares a publisher in France.
In “The Unknown” an unconscious and dehydrated young woman appears in the port of Barcelona inside an undeclared container, she does not remember who she is or what her mother tongue is, but she is alive.
While she is recovering in the hospital, a man tries to assassinate her and that is when inspector Anna Ripoll seems to have identified her as a French woman from Lyon, where inspector Erik Zapori will take charge of the investigation for which he will have to travel to Spain.
“We were both in the middle of a frenzy professionally: me, promoting my previous novel, ‘The Danger of Being Sane,’ and Olivier, who is also a journalist at ‘Le Monde,’ was covering the war in Ukraine in professional situation”, commented Montero.
The new tandem followed the premises of previous experiences, a French writer with another from the festival’s guest country, in this case Spain.
Rosa Montero knew that she was going to get along well with Truc
The Madrid writer knew that she was going to get along well with Truc despite the communication difficulties, since she did not spend more than 50 days at his house and he was in Ukraine.
Montero assures that “Olivier had the enormous generosity of accepting to start with an idea of mine and from there we both continued” and adds that “it could seem like an exquisite surreal corpse, but that scheme cannot be applied to a crime novel, which is all the opposite, with its rules and its clockwork apparatus”.
The author of “La buena suerte” was in charge of the first chapter and from then on the odd ones, and Truc wrote the even chapters and the last one: “Apart from being surprised, we were trying to create a common project, we gave each other clues, we agreed on the development of the plot and the characters.
Montero recalls that “being a novelist is such a lonely job” that it would never have occurred to him to write with four hands if this proposal had not arrived.
He explains as a curiosity that for four months the chapters were exchanged, each one in his own language, which was then translated by the translators, but the communication between the two about “the kitchen of writing” was done in English.
Montero reveals that he started from the “unknown” first and although Truc had told him that he did not want a police officer, “Anna Ripoll slipped into the story when she showed up at the hospital: in the end, you don’t choose what you want to do.”
Truc, who has described the experience as an “extraordinary adventure”, points out that “Rosa Montero has been very generous, because having a very limited time, she proposed a different idea from the small one that I had proposed and in the end hers was the good”.
Olivier Truc in his first collaborative writing
The French writer, who has also debuted in a collaborative writing experience, feels that “the story created belongs to both of us and it would not have worked with a war of egos.”
When he began writing the novel, he was simultaneously doing a report in Zaporizhia, from which he extracted the name of the inspector from Lyon.
Both authors share journalistic work, although, as Montero acknowledges, it is “a written journalism that has nothing to do with running a newspaper or working on television, but that journalism that we both do is a literary genre in itself” and cites as For example, “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote, which “is a report and it is literature” and, in fact, adds: “It is rare for a writer to cultivate only one genre.”
There is no direct influence from journalism, the Madrid author points out, even though everything comes from the same person: “In journalism, clarity is fundamental and in novels, ambiguity is a value, in journalism you talk about what you know, in novels you talk about what that you don’t know that you know, because you speak from the unconscious; in journalism you are a tree that talks about the tree next to you, and in a novel you are an eagle that flies and talks about the forest”.
Another advantage, according to Truc, is that “as a journalist we sometimes feel that our interlocutor may be deceiving us, and on the other hand, fiction allows us to get rid of all that.”