Jose Oliva |
The writer Aro Sáinz de la Maza combats “the epidemic of sexist violence” in his latest novel, “Malart”, which closes the tetralogy starring his character, the police inspector Milo Malart, “a book by Malart without Malart”, assures the author.
In “Malart” (Destiny) two dead men appear on the high seas aboard a yacht off the coast of Barcelona at dawn, a married couple belonging to the high bourgeoisie that Malart knew very well, since they were acquitted in the trial for the murder of a young woman thanks to to timely contamination of evidence.
The deceased, Ivo Parés and Mónica Morera, are the heirs of two of the richest and most powerful families in the country, they had met in a detoxification center, fell in love and got married, and since then they have been inseparable at parties, drugs and committing illegalities that thanks to his power were hidden.
Faced with the evidence that seems to point to Milo as the perpetrator of the double crime, the inspector disappears and a fight begins on the part of his police partner Rebeca Mercader to clarify the case, “a character who gains weight, like all the women in this novel, who she will end up resolving the investigation using intuition and premonitions common to Malart, but rare for her, always accustomed to using reason and evidence”, the writer said in an interview with EFE.
Without recognizing himself as an expert, Aro Sáinz is aware that “part of the Catalan bourgeoisie enjoys a certain impunity, due to the means at its disposal”, but in this novel he uses them to speak of “the sect of money, that collective that pollutes everything, poisons it, those who are going to destroy the planet”.
The author admits that it has been a challenge to write “a Malart novel without Malart”, but his intention was “to give more prominence to the secondaries of the homicide group, above all, to Rebeca Mercader, his partner, the sub-inspector who grows a lot as a character, who on many occasions acts like Milo, blends in with him and has no choice but to apply his methods, even adopting the vices of the policeman”.
Fourth novel for Sáinz de la Maza
This fourth novel, adds Sáinz de la Maza, speaks of many “cliffs, those abysses that make us all dizzy, loneliness, meaninglessness, emptiness”, and in a game of mirrors confronts the reader with his own cliffs. , “seeking their involvement”.
At the end of the novel, he places the reader in a dilemma because “there is a profound twist that can alter the interpretation of the three previous books.
For the Barcelona writer, “many of Milo’s reactions could be taken as the beginning of schizophrenia”, a subject that has forced him to document himself, and this twist at the end of the tetralogy was not clear to him in the previous three: “He presented it to me Milo himself, with whom I have a cordial relationship, but to whom I hand over the helm, because I trust his intuitions more than mine, and by leaving him free, the character makes some decisions that take the novel to a place that you did not imagine”.
Aro Sáinz started this fourth novel shortly after confinement – “before I could not focus, my head was in survival mode,” he says – and “I wanted to talk about the pandemic but without talking about the covid, and that pandemic is worse because it does not have a vaccine nor will there be, it is violence against women”.
From the personal experience of the pandemic arises “this scarcity of open spaces in the novel” and as a reaction to that other pandemic of which he speaks “the main characters are women, they are the ones who make the real decisions.”
The author takes stock of the tetralogy, which now appears as “a gigantic countdown”: “The first takes place in 18 days, the second in nine, the third in four and the latter in 60 hours, a reduction in time that, given the slowness of criminalistics to analyze the evidence forces the emotional factor to be essential to advance in the closure ”.
Sáinz is already preparing the fifth installment of Milo Malart, in which “he will return to his solitude, he will resort more to conventional firearms and he will have to investigate a case that takes place in Oslo, the territory of policeman Harry Hole by Jo Nesbo, with the that surely will be crossed several times, in an admiring and respectful way ”, he assures.
