He is known above all for his work as a biographer, where he painted wonderful portraits of Gil de Biedma, Goytisolo, who won the Anagrama Prize, Oscar Wilde, Pasolini, Julio Cortázar, Concha García Campoy…
Miguel Dalmau (Barcelona, … 1957) HHe developed the novel with titles such as “La grieta”, Followed by “Hitler’s Clock” which won the Short Fiction Prize on the 15th of Juan March or “The Night of the Devil”.
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author
Miguel Dalmau -
Editorial
Gutenberg Galaxy -
year
2025 -
Pages
368 -
price
23.50 euros
Her latest novel, “Bertha’s Ashes” LVI International Novel Prize The City of Barbastro, It is presented as a “thriller” and I say this as evidence because the narrative goes far beyond that genre, in fact it does. A very classic novel in form, Very pure, clear prose, without a trace of rhetoric and certainly a lack of the humility that comes with stretching things to unexpected limits.
It deals with pain, loneliness and the false beliefs that one clings to in order to survive and all of this is wonderfully framed in the mouth of the Guadalquivir, Sanlucar de Barrameda on one side, and on the other, the Coto de Doñana, a river that has been home to countless legends for centuries, some very recent such as the “Cat’s Eye Garnet”, by José Manuel Caballero Bonald or the writings dedicated to that land by Abel. Chapman or Jorge Molina’s monumental document.
It is presented as a “thriller” and I say this as evidence because the narrative goes far beyond that genre.
But what is interesting about Dalmau’s description is that although it reflects the scene realistically, toUgra likened it to the great myths reflected by rivers In our history, from Achilles and Scamander to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or the wonderful vision of Missouri in “O Brother”… by the Coen brothers…
From the first pages of the novel, we witness the hidden, the mysterious, that conceals that current capable of hypnotizing a man like Julio Denis, the narrator, who… He went to Sanlucar to scatter the ashes of his beloved Berta. In the river but repeatedly delays it, claiming that he witnessed the murder of a woman in Koto while looking from the vantage point of a hotel seven hundred meters away on a windy and foggy day.
But in this magic, which has to do with the spell, many characters in the novel participate, from Luli and Commissioner Marchena to Francisco Larios, the journalist who writes with a typical letter of the past that he refuses to abandon, and the agent Galán, gEntities are somehow enchanted by the river And life, above all, is enchanted by the dead: “We therefore had to accept that everything we experienced with the dead was a pre-birth existence, a necessary time to encounter the rest of life.”
The novel is built around A mysterious murder of two girlsdaughter of Commissioner Marchena and Lucía Venegas de Terre, whose family’s real estate agency wanted to convert a palace belonging to the Marchioness of Miraflores into a hotel. The victims also wore coins placed over their eyes… Oddly enough, the explanation of these murders acts as a driving force for life. Finally, Julio Denis scattered Berta’s ashes in the river.