Marcos Ordoñez - Detrás del Hielo

If you're loooking for a Spanish author who can really write, look no further than Marcos Ordoñez, Spain's foremost theater critic (with the Madrid-based El País) and also a novelist. Ordoñez keeps the pulse of Spain's entertainment culture, drawing from a knowledge base forged from a lifetime of media consumption. To talk music, film, literature, or whatever, with Marcos is to be in the presence of a natural guru.

Ordoñez's latest fiction work, Detrás del Hielo, is a critique of political power that challenges common notions of love and loyalty and blurs the line between right and wrong itself. The story tracks young Klara's coming of age as she falls in love with two best friends amidst ever-deepening political turmoil in the made-up country of Moira. There's Oskar, a well-to-do photographer whose family struggles to keep a tenuous grip on aristocracy; and Jan, a cinema critic whose political leanings make him a marked man. Oskar is Klara's first boyfriend, but a fling with Jan has more sparkle even though Klara knows it's not exclusive. At times, they maintain a three-way relationship that, despite all the stress it entails, also seems to represent the pinnacle of their respective friendships.

The declining political situation mirrors the complexity of the three-way relationship. The unpopular but reasonable liberal president is replaced by a political machine that quickly curtails civil liberties and freedom of the press. (Moira looks a lot like Perón's Argentina.) Jan, a member of an opposition paramilitary group, is forced to go on the run. No one can contact him for some time, but late in the novel, the three are reunited once more in the cafe where they first met. It is a poignant scene as Jan's attitude foreshadows his disappearance soon thereafter. Klara must wrestle with the guilt of putting him in danger by insisting on their final meeting.

The intentions of the book were really not clear to me until the very end. I was waiting for the inevitable confrontation between Jan and Oskar over Clara, but it never came. While I assumed Ordoñez was building up slowly to the climax like in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, he was really proposing a different paradigm of love and attraction. On the surface of it, the three-way seems wrong, but with these characters, how could it have been any other way?

It is a strange story, to be fair, but the quality of Ordoñez's writing is what really sets it apart. His powers of description and his ability to make you truly understand the characters are amazing.

The book was all the more intriguing for me since I know Marcos personally. I remember him saying he chose Moira to save himself the meticulous research a real setting would require. Still, I have questions. Jan reminds me of Tuvia Bielski, who led the Polish militants that protected 1200 Jewish civilians during the Holocaust. Could this be a reference too obscure even for Marcos? I'd be a fool to assume so, especially since I know how much Marcos admires Jews. Probably the biggest question is which character the author identifies most with: Jan, the cinema aficionado, or Oskar, the more mild-mannered of the two but also the more acculturated?

Detrás del Hielo is published by Zeta Bolsillo in Spain and is probably available on half.com or ebay.es.