Esther García Llovet
Spanish Beauty
Translation by Richard Village
SPAIN
ISBN: 978-1-73-844638-4
A crooked cop on a punk, picaresque chase through Benidorm's underbelly on the trail of Reggie Kray's cigarette lighter.
Meet Michela - English gangster father, flamenco dancer mother - a hard, uncompromising police officer, operating on the shadier side of the law. In the company of this unorthodox, magnetically compelling character, cult writer Esther García Llovet takes us on a breath-taking, high-speed, anarchic romp through the underbelly of the pearl of the Costa Brava, Benidorm, on a quest for the lighter.
Beyond the sunburn and all-day fry-ups, in casinos, bars that are fronts for money laundering and flashy high society parties, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters: English gangsters, Russian mafiosi, chancers, no-hopers, and low-life of all complexions in this unconventional yet literary thriller. With a turn of phrase that always astonishes, an eye for detail that is as forensic as it is cinematic, a sense of humour as dry as a glass of fino, and a wilful desire to break conventional genres, Llovet’s book feels like the best of Almodóvar in surreal, novel form.
ESTHER GARCIA LLOVET was born in Málaga in 1963. She moved to Madrid in 1970 to study clinical psychology and film direction, and she has lived there ever since. She started writing in 2000 and has written eight novels, including the three novels of her acclaimed Snapshot Trilogy of Madrid. Spanish Beauty is the first episode of her new Trilogy of the Spanish Levant. Her works have achieved critical success and cult status for their intense, cinematic style and offbeat Chandleresque realism. García Llovet writes for several different cultural anthologies and periodicals, is a translator from English and a well-respected photographer.
RICHARD VILLAGE is a London-based translator and editor working from Spanish and Italian into English. He studied literary translation at the University of East Anglia and is the founder of Foundry Editions.
PREVIEW:
Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of vomit, pissing against walls and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. Chlamydia. And the sea. Like the desert of the Levant, of the West, of Las Vegas, shadows of skyscrapers on the beach, reaching higher and higher, shadows that go on for miles, stretching over the surface of the lukewarm sea at ten at night, whilst families eat fried chicken on the shore, Mediterranean steel Godzillas on the cold dawn sand.
Martin lives in an Airbnb. In a nine-euro-a-night room, in a tiny villa in Rincón de Loix behind the endless row of nineeuro-a-set-menu Chinese restaurants. The room has two beds, he uses one for sleeping and the other as a kind of table where he eats, writes his songs, and leaves his things. Not that he’s got much. Dirty t-shirts and Alan Moore comics. There’s a photo drawing-pinned to the wall, a postcard of some compact, white clouds and beneath each one, some blocks of ice floating on a grey ocean, like exact reflections of the clouds. The postcard is from Canada. It says so underneath. Canada. There’s also a White Stripes poster.
“Where the fuck are you?” growls Michela. She opens the drawer on the bedside table. It’s lined with floral vinyl. Empty. Ants. There’s only one plug in the room and if Martin wants to turn on the water heater to wash or charge his phone, he has to unplug the lamp and do it in the dark. The phone charger is plugged in. So, Martin hasn’t gone anywhere, or won’t have gone far, he’s almost definitely in Benidorm. Where is the question. Michela picks up a pair of jeans from the bed and checks the pockets. She finds a receipt from the Multipollo chicken shop at the bus station. She looks at the date. It’s from 11.47. 11.47 this morning.
