The writer Pérez-Reverte publishes ‘The Island of the Sleeping Woman’ (Alfaguara)
The ‘best-selling’ Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte seems faithful to his quote of publishing a new novel every year. If last season the shelves were filled with The Final Problem, in which it recovered the tradition of crime and mystery to pay homage to the character of Sherlock Holmes and its author, Arthur Conan Doyle, this time it presents The Island of the Sleeping Woman, in which focuses on another of his obsessions, the stories of pirates in the maritime environment.
For him, since he was young, the term “privateer” has always evoked the idea of travel stories linked to some essential readings in his training such as Treasure Island or The Black Corsair. Furthermore, his father had been a merchant seaman and had instilled in him a love of fishing and the sea. Therefore, in some way, it is as if, on this occasion, he returned to the origins of his intimate and family memory to talk about his childhood from an adult perspective, approaching the Mediterranean as his “homeland” and recreating those landscapes that have marked.
The Island of the Sleeping Woman
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The novel is based on a real event: the trafficking of goods and military aid from the USSR to Spain during the Civil War. However, from this historical context, the plot delves into fiction with the invention of an island, a mission and a crew. “The torpedo boat and those crew members are what is truly Revertian,” explains the author, who wanted to build a territory as personal as it is mythical.
Alfaguara editorial news: ‘The Island of the Sleeping Woman’, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
The novel’s protagonist is a professional sailor with no ideological affiliation. “I grew up among sailors, my father was a friend of many captains, and I have always admired them,” recalls Reverte, who sought to portray in his protagonist someone far from conventions and fanaticisms, a common man who faces war as an accident. of destiny. For him, these characters are more fascinating because of their distance from the land and the freedom they find in the solitude of the sea.
The female figure of Lena Katelios, another of the fundamental presences, arises both from literary tradition and from her own experience. Reverte admits that she is not based on a specific woman, but on a recurring idea when representing complex women in her texts, with a past that defines them and gives them a special density. Women with experience who, in some way, enrich the male characters by giving them a heroic dimension through their gaze.
Reverte, with vast experience as a correspondent in conflict zones, admits that the war has marked his vision of the world and his narrative. “I have lived twenty-one years in war. For me, war is very useful narratively, because it offers me a variety of situations, tensions or uncertainties that I would have a harder time finding in peace,” he confesses. His work does not focus on the confrontation between “good guys and bad guys”, but on the complexity of the characters and the circumstances they face. “Even if I set my mind to it, it is impossible for me to write a novel about good guys and bad guys.”
The writer born in Cartagena, Arturo Pérez-Reverte
The novel also addresses the harshness of war at sea, an environment that, according to Reverte, “has no compassion and kills both those who are good and those who are bad.” It is a space where justice has no place and magnifies its cruelty. “If a ship sinks, the normal thing is to pick up the survivors, but in a certain type of war, you have to abandon them. That is the rule, the drama,” says the author, reflecting in his pages not only the violence of the conflict, but also the remorse and loyalties that arise in moments of tragedy.
For Reverte, The Island of the Sleeping Woman does not seek to teach lessons or improve the world, but rather to offer a well-told story that captivates the reader. “I don’t want the world to be better when I finish my novel, I just build interesting plots so that the reader can live with me,” he concludes.
The novel takes place in April 1937. Spain is in the middle of the Civil War while the mechant sailor Miguel Jordán Kyriazis will be sent by the rebel side to the Aegean Sea to attack the Soviets who are helping the Republic. At the base of operations, the protagonist’s life will intersect with that of Baron Katelios and his wife, a seductive woman who wants to escape her destiny. A story of adventure, espionage and romance with a historical background, a trademark of the house.
