AUTHOR: Gonzalo Torné
PUBLISHER: Editorial Anagrama
GENRE: Literary fiction
READER’S NAME: Danielle Maxson
DATE: June 10, 2020

Catalan author Gonzalo Torné describes the motivation behind his fourth novel, El corazón de la fiesta (The Heart of the Party), as the desire to “write a nightmare about money.” The Spanish autonomous community of Catalonia, Torné’s homeland, has its own ready-made nightmare in the trial of longtime Catalan President Jordi Pujol and his family for money laundering and corruption. Although Torné asserts that the Pujol family is not the inspiration for his work, this novel easily evokes the not-too-distant memory of that scandal. In El corazón de la fiesta, Torné creates the fictional Masclans clan, a wealthy and politically powerful family, and a lower-class woman who marries into that family to spin a satirical tale of money, power, identity, and the intersection of personal and political crises.

The novel is divided into four parts, beginning from the point of view of Clara Montsalvatges, a woman who has inherited a large apartment from a relative who made his fortune as a low-level participant in the government of Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who held power in Spain from 1939 until 1975. Uncomfortable with the source of her windfall, she turns the apartment into a refuge for women friends in need of rest and recovery from physical or emotional ills. When the couple next door start having regular shouting matches and physical confrontations, Clara calls in her ex to help her “resolve the situation.” Soon they learn that the couple are none other than the Bastardo – the illegitimate son of the Catalan President, also known as the King of Catalonia – and the Bastardo’s middle-class wife, Violeta Mancebo.

Part II, by far the largest part of the novel, recounts Violeta’s story – her mother’s death from cancer, her father’s subsequent relationship with a much younger woman, Violeta’s own relationship with her husband, and her strained dealings with the Masclans family – by interweaving third-person narration with Violeta’s words to Clara as she explores her own history. As Violeta’s relationship with the family and with her husband disintegrates, the source of their obscene wealth is revealed to be less than legal. By the end of part II, Violeta is caught between her husband and her lover while the Masclans family’s longtime money laundering is revealed, ruining the family’s reputation.

Parts III and IV return to Clara and her ex as he researches the scandal and interviews members of the family to create a more complete picture of the outcome, while also investigating their perspectives on Violeta’s character. By the end of the novel, the reader has a complex understanding of two marriages, a politically powerful and corrupt family, and some of the tensions between the people of Catalonia and the rest of Spain.

On a technical level, a good English translation of this novel will require a particularly skilled translator. The text regularly includes characters speaking in Catalan, from single words tossed into a conversation to entire paragraphs of dialog. The translator will need to have both Catalan and Spanish as working languages in order to render these inclusions correctly. Cultural knowledge of Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia will also be important to the translation. This story is set firmly in Catalonia, and cultural references like names of neighborhoods and regional foods pop up regularly. Some may require either footnotes or glossing within the text, and the translator will need to be prepared for that.

This is not to say that a good English translation is not achievable or that the novel will not do well in an American market. The concrete details of the Barcelona setting serve to ground the story within a specific cultural context, but the larger themes of political corruption and difficult or broken relationships should certainly resonate with American readers. The Masclans family’s attitudes about money, their use of it, and their manipulation of others’ lives in order to make matters more comfortable for themselves will strike a chord with many readers who keep an eye on national political conversations. And Violeta’s transformation from hardworking ingénue to a woman accustomed to luxury but never quite accepted by her upper-class family is both intriguing and heart-wrenching.

Torné is a distinguished Spanish author, winner of the Premio Jaén de Novela, and translator into Spanish of Wordsworth and other luminaries. One of Torné’s earlier novels has been published in English as Divorce Is In the Air, and El corazón de la fiesta would be an excellent addition to his offerings in English.