Aquesta puta tan distingida

Many readers in Catalonia have lost this masterpiece: Marsé's latest novel, a key piece of an auscultation that begins with Uncertain Glory and The Sea and comes to our present thanks to a Catalan writer who never wrote in their mother tongue. The theme is the memory of the trauma experienced in the postwar period. The invention is a novel that sparkles with intelligence, rabid humor and fleshy tenderness for characters who are the ghosts of the author -and a whole country that does not know how to exorcise them-. The plot could be summed up as follows: In 1982, a writer who resembles Marsé interviews a man sentenced to prison in 1949 for a murder he remembers committing without remembering his mobile phone. The aim of the interview is to write the script for a film for a stubbornly anti-Franco director, although it will be produced by a television maneuver that turns the story into a historical porn starring a blind whore. But the whore so distinguished from the title is not this, but the way we have to explain ourselves. The famous memory. Reader, welcome to this cutting and tailoring school.