The Buenos Aires Quintet - Manuel Vázquez Montalban (1999)

Read in 10 days from Amsterdam to Rio Gallegos via Madrid, Buenos Aires and Ushuaia. Felt very disjointed but that´s perhaps not surprising. Strange book, sometimes very ´plat´ thriller type met veel doden en bloed enzo en dan weer ineens komt er een briljante citaat over het zin van het leven/reizen/cultuur. (Sorry, bedacht me ineens dat ik dit weer naar de grrls schrijft ipv mijn blog! Schrijf
nu in Rio Gallegos, kan ik het boek hier achterlaten morgen.) Ik geloof dat als ik het niet ´hier´ had gelezen had ik het allang aan de kant gezet maar juist door de herkenning (van straatnamen, gewoontes, dat soort kleine dingen) was het weer juist het perfecte boek voor het begin van mijn reis. Het verhaal is redelijk ingewikkeld maar het hoofd thema is dat een detective uit Barcelona gaat op zoek naar een
verdwenen nichtje van een oom van hem (een ´cousin´ van hem dan - Nederlands heeft weer niet een aparte woord hiervoor...). Vaak was ik totaal de weg kwijt met alle personen die komen en gaan door het verhaal, maar af en toe waren er briljante stukjes. Vooral het einde leest als een soort versie van de film The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. Moord in een keuken tijdens een gourmet diner.
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Her age showing some attractive wrinkles and an ironic filter for everything she sees.
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(over de vrouwen die nog steeds protesteren over hun verdwenen kinderen in Buenos Aires)
Few local people are looking on,only a few tourists who perhaps are ethical tourists, perhaps not. Feelings of emoton, curiosity and indifference in equal measure, there´s even a certain annoyance in the air among the passers-by, because of the ´bad reputation´this insistence on historical memory gives the city.
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empty dock warehouses, falling into ruin, poetically obsolete and useless
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Culture doesn´t teach you how to live. It´s nothing more than a mask for fear and ignorance. For death. Take a cow on the pampas...[...] say you kill it, and eat it raw. Everyone would point at you: look at that barbarian, that savage. If on the other hand you catch the cow, kill it, slice up skilfully, roast it, and then put sauce on it: that´s culture. A disguise for cannibalism.
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Not even nation states have sovereignty any more. We´re ruled by multinationals, by monetary funds, by fixed prices, by Yankee Doodle soldiers.
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A driver has a flat tyre and thinks to himself: I don´t like where I came from, and I don´t like where I´m going to. So why am I in such a hurry to get the tyre changed? (Brecht)
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you get back to the really important things in life - killing and eating
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What´s better: to be a postman or a writer? Being a postman is more secure; and anyway, where would writers be without postmen?
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As if the flavours help him find his way home, he feels more at ease and begins to enjoy himself.
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Books, books. Real life is outside books, you know. But it always ends up in books. Everything that´s done - good or bad - finds its way into books in the end.
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We´ve burnt all the doors. Doors shouldn´t exist - they´re a bourgeois invention. There were no doors in noble savages´ houses.
(oja, bijna vergeten, hij brandt ook veel boeken, erg vreemd)
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Don Vito slumps into the office armchair, exhausted by the tango that is his life.
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Carvalho enjoys Buenos Aires cafés, where alongside the wooden panels and polished metal you can enjoy a space where time is on your side.
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(Over Robinson Crusoe) So it is not an innocent myth, but rather an attempt to explain man´s position in the world as that of an individual who can dominate it thanks to his experience, his intelligence and the support of Providence. Defoe sets out the Philosophy of the ascendant, all-conquering bourgeoisie
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The buzz of young people chatting, consuming breakfasts, books, jokes, reaches his ears like a distantly familiar sound landscape. (hostel in Ushuaia)
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When Argentina was a rich and civilized country, we had the finest and best-kept cars in the world. D´you know when I first realized how bad things had become? When I saw that people didn´t bother to fix the dents in their cars, or to whitewash their tyres.
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They walk back to Carvalho´s apartment, his bag full of death, his head full of plans for cooking.
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He boards the train in Retiro station, with its distant echoes of Victorian splendour.
(ik was hier mijn eerste dag, het heeft inderdaad een soort verlepte
schoonheid, fallen grandure)
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People have lost all respect for the telephone, he thinks, and talk and talk without realizing that beyond the person they are talking to,in the basements of the telephone companies there are Lilliputian accountants rubbing their hands with glee at the profits they are making thanks to all these blabbermouths.
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he did not really believe Australia existed.
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