Those artists who work in the non-verbal media have an easier time connecting to the cultures of the countries they visit, to their fellow artists abroad. Music, visual art, dance, move easily across cultural borders to touch our hearts, even our minds, certainly our souls. Writers have a harder time – language carries culture, represents its unique world-view. We read in translation, hoping that something of the cultural specifics will reach us.
A week of rain in Cadaques, the Costa Brava village that was supposed to provide a week of sun-filled relaxation, has driven me to Spanish pop lit. Don’t worry – I haven’t succumbed to fantasy or romance yet; mysteries and historical epics are what sell best in Spain.
I’ve discovered something interesting. Spaniards, like most new generations of previously devout Catholic cultures, are resolutely non-clerical and secular, and a sizeable proportion even raise families in common-law partnerships. But their popular literature, while fulfilling the entertainment requirements of genre writing, often raises questions of faith, mysticism, and the transcendent.
Arturo Perez-Reverte is a well-known Spanish war correspondent and TV journalist. As a writer he’s best known for historical swashbucklers in the Alexandre Dumas style. But he also writes stylish noir crime novels, with an elegant Vatican operative as his existential hero. The Seville Communion, which won the European Literature Prize, finds his tech-savvy priest on the trail of a hacker who’s broken the Vatican’s cyber wall as part of a campaign to save a crumbling church in Seville. With plot twists including a renegade parish priest, an independent-minded American nun, and a too-attractive noblewoman all fighting corporate property development, what turns out to be at stake is nothing less than the nature of faith, and the role of the church in the contemporary world. Behind it all lies a faint hint that the transcendent world may just exist.
Javier Sierra, also a well-known radio and television presenter, is younger than Perez-Reverte, and less discreet about his possible belief. The Lady in Blue spans time and space, presenting a fictional mystery revolving around a real-life Church phenomenon, the 17th-century cloistered nun and mystic Sister Maria Jesus de Agreda, alleged to have bilocated to appear before native populations in New Mexico in advance of the Spanish missionaries. The power of Sierra’s book is in his ability to unite cutting-edge research into psychic phenomena, include work done by the US military, with traditional religious lore.
Spain’s population may be predominately, and increasingly, secular. But abiding interest in Catholicism, in faith, and in the mystical, endures.
How utterly fascinating, Kitty. (Are you reading these in Spanish?) I’ve always wanted an excuse to read crime noir novels so now when it’s a rainy day that’s what I’ll do.