Oscar Wilde stated that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about about you and that is not being talked about.” With this maxim as a banner, the spring of 2017 Carmen Mola was born with an overwhelming marketing campaign and a biography devised with the intention of empathizing with the female audience. So much so that the controversy when it was revealed that three writers were hiding behind this pseudonym set the networks on fire. Something that, according to Wilde’s statement, does nothing more than feed the legend and get everyone to talk about the publication of a novel, something that we cannot deny is an achievement in our country.
La Bestia, Premio Planeta 2021, starts with an image that seeks to generate an impact on the reader from the beginning: a dog plays with the head of a girl. The story is set in Madrid in the summer of 1834. The city is ravaged by a cholera epidemic. No one knows very well how the disease is spread and accusations to the clergy of poisoning the waters cause riots and massacres. In the midst of all that chaos, several corpses of girls appear dismembered and rumors draw a monstrous being, a beast that can only be of animal origin due to its cruelty. The appearance of a secret society will be the finishing touch for a plot that borders more on folk melodrama than the frenetic thriller that the synopsis tries to sell.
We could affirm that it is not a historical novel, but only of historical setting, if the authors did not obsessively highlight the date of 1834. From the narration of the massacre of friars on July 17 to the constant allusion to the Carlist confrontations. Perhaps this is why certain anachronisms grind so much, such as allude to the rise of enigma novels in England seven years before the publication of The Crimes of the Morgue Street, by Edgar Allan Poe, that at a time when the illiterate population hovered between 80% and 90% have so many characters who can read, and who are even surprised when another does not know, or that a protection is appealed to childhood (such as that a girl should not drink wine) that neither existed nor was intuited yet.
In the dialogues the rich man speaks the same as the poor man and this is due to a very poor use of language throughout the work. The same adjectives are repeated until exhaustion and the use of the present tense for the omniscient narrator does not work in their favor. Despite all this, the most annoying element may be the low confidence in the reader’s retentive capacity.
There is an unhealthy concern that this is not lost through constant repetition. The text doesn’t shine, but neither does the story. This progresses in fits and starts, decaying excessively and in too many moments. A tedious work that does not meet even the most basic premise that is required of this type of book: entertain.
– .
