Marcelo Luján wins the Dashiell Hammet Prize 2016 for “Subsoil”. Ignacio del Valle wins the Buenos Aires Negra in the same festival
19/07/2016The Argentine Marcelo Luján (Buenos Aires, 1973) has been awarded the Dashiell Hammett, the principal recognition awarded at the Semana Negra de Gijón, for his book Subsuelo (Subsoil), a disturbing and sober thriller that has been considered by the judges as the best book of the noir genre published in Spain in 2015. Luján won the Getafe award in 2009 for “La mala espera”. Visibly emotional, the winner has assured that one of his “childhood dreams has been fulfilled” and that it is a prize “for the risky decisions taken at the beginning of the writing of the novel.” With this novel, the winner, whether he likes to go towards the margins of the genre or directly disaffiliate from it, shows that he is an excellent anatomist of daily evil. Three adolescents, three siblings, are sitting on the edge of a pool in a summer house. A fourth arrives late and has to go get ice but doesn’t feel like it. He doesn’t know that his contempt will be the beginning of the tragedy. From this nice and apparently anodyne point of departure, Luján unfurls a deep analysis of desire, envy, hatred, filial love and predatory sex and destruction. A book with a simple style, a thriller based on the strength of the characters and which pays tribute in its profundity to the master Patricia Highsmith. The author of “Moravia” succeeds Carlos Zanón in the list of winners, as well as Alexis Ravelo and Guillermo Saccomanno, the last three to have won it, along with a prestigious group of authors that include Ignacio Taibo II, Andreu Martín, Juan Madrid, and Jorge Reverte. In the same festival, Ignacio del Valle won the Buenos Aires Negra Award for Soles Negros (Black Suns) from the Arturo Andrade Series.
[ ... ]Ýndigo Mar
Pablo is writer who retires to a deserted housing development on an island, in winter, to finish a novel that resist itself. The days go by in blank, lost amid the ghosts and the tensions of creation, till his isolation will be broken by terrible dreams and unexpected characters, none which will be whom they claim to be. Jungian manifestations of panthers that talk to him in dreams; a mysterious hunter for lost objects on beaches; hash smugglers; a young sensual women accosted by her ex; cleaning ladies with a terrifying past; empty homes whose windows light up at odd hours; couples exchanges under the rain; abandoned oil rigs, full of old stories, not all pleasant… And the same island, a telluric entity perforated by subterranean galleries, whose manifestations infect Pablo’s dreams, forcing him to intern himself in a labyrinth where reality and fiction are mistaken. An island in where, hour upon hour, a terrifying storm approaches, and one in which finally all the masks come off leading the characters to a nightmarish denouement. “Indigo Sea” is a meta-literary thriller that reflects upon the conflicts of reality and desire, the devils and fears that haunt creators, savage love, the fragility of friendship, unchecked sensuality, violence, taboos… Undoubtedly, Ignacio del Valle’s most personal novel todate.
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