Author: Ginés Sánchez
- Fiction
- Tusquets Editores
- ISBN: 9788483837887
- Release Date: 02-15-2013
-Reviewed by: Félix Lizárraga
Los gatos pardos (All Cats Are Grey) received in 2013 the IX Tusquets Publishers Award, although it is only Ginés Sánchez’s second novel. It is also a gripping read. It is a book that is hard to put down, even when the violence in it becomes a little too much to handle. Because there is violence in this book. A lot of it.
Los gatos pardos follows the stories of three characters whose lives become strangely intertwined in one night, during a St. John’s Eve celebration in Murcia. Two of them, Jacintito and Ginés, make their living as gangsters at the service of a kingpin only known throughout the novel as The Great Man. The third, María, is a teenage girl who likes to draw, as her only means to escape the sordidness of her life. The story of that fateful night is told in flashbacks from the point of view of each one of them, so sometimes we revisit scenes as each one of them remembers what happened.
We learn a lot about these three characters throughout the novel. We learn, for example, that one of the gangsters, who is notorious as a cold-blooded assassin, actually abhors violence. Another character turns out to lead a secret life as a serial killer. At a certain point, we find out that Jacintito’s recurring nightmares about a fat woman tortured to death in a run-down bar have their source in María’s drawings.
Sex and violence play a central part in this novel. They are never gratuitous, but they are intense, and not for the squeamish. A horrifyingly thorough chronicle of the torture and death of one of the Great Man’s enemies takes over a good portion of the first third on the novel; the exploits of the serial murderer are told in stomach-turning detail during the last third. There is plenty of gore in between. Sánchez’s characters inhabit a bleak, hopeless universe. There is a sort of deification of the gangster in a lot of contemporary fiction; that is not the case here. A party scene in the mansion of the Great Man shows them reduced to mere gladiators who play Russian roulette for the amusement of the guests.
Despite the complexities of the narrative, and the constant jumping from past to present, and from one character to another, those jumps are smoothly done and very easy to follow. There is a veritable cornucopia of vivid, interesting characters, each with his/her own distinctive voice. Sánchez’s prose is rich and sometimes even poetic.
Los gatos pardos is an excellent book, if a bleak and gory one. I highly recommend it.
