Double Search

Pedro de Paz

El tercer nombre • 2006 • 202 pg.

Javier Sánchez Zapatero
Translation: Helena Chadderton

 

The endlessly solitary life of Jaime Areta, a young introverted IT worker, is radically transformed during one of his morbid internet searches for pornography, the night he comes across Noela, a girl he used to be deeply and hopelessly in love with. After several years with no contact with her nor any news from the group of friends they belonged to, Jaime finds himself confronted by a past he thought he had forgotten and which appears now to be present, intensely present, in the form of blatant carnal photography. Convinced of the fact that, as the song goes, “there is no worse nostalgia than regretting what never happened” and aware that life doesn't always give second chances, Jaime doesn't hesitate to put everything he has into finding this woman who once obsessed him when she crosses his path again. The search for Noela's home and for the reasons which have brought her to take part in the disturbing world of pornography, do not only bring him back into contact with several friends but also force him to discover a world of corruption, blackmail, murder and white slave trade more terrible than a simple exchange of sexual images could ever have suggested.

Dolls behind the window, the young Madrid-based author's second novel, begins with this interesting departure point, a story of action and intrigue which reveals the more perverse side of new technology. The environment surrounding crime is changing and it is no longer necessary that detective literature be about perfect crimes, about majordomos who always have something to hide or scrupulous politicians obsessed by power and money. In a world dominated by cybernetic networks and the information society, novelistic plots must adapt to these new environments in the name of plausibility and realism which the detective genre habitually demands.

Although, in certain passages, the plot is a little stereotypical and not very convincing, with a little conspiracy, characteristic of some genres of thriller, the reading is easy and enjoyable.

Well structured, with dramatic turns of event calculated to surprise the reader without becoming a soap opera, the novel, which would make a good basis for a film scenario, grabs the reader with the voracity of intense works which demand to be read in one go. The style of the author perfectly fits the constant narrative tension of the plot; in turn encircling and suggestive, becoming rhythmic and direct in the action scenes. These two registers complement the thematic duality posed by the novel whose main thread presents two clearly distinct searches. In addition to the enquiry about the woman's address, which is presented to the hero via pornographic images of the years after their final meeting, Dolls behind the window tells the story of an interior quest with the goal being to give direction to an escaped past.

Because, although life sometimes gives second chances, they are never the same as the first.