The academic confirms that he will close the ‘Alatriste’ saga with two more titles: “They are already thought out and are just waiting to be written”
LONDON, 5 Sep. (from the special envoy of EUROPA PRESS, Eduardo Blanco) –
The writer and academic Arturo Pérez-Reverte has presented this Tuesday, September 5, his new novel ‘The final problem’ (Alfaguara), a tribute to the saga of the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, while he has meditated on a possible future in which I no longer write.
“The time to stop writing is going to be hard and I hope that when the moment comes when my head fails, my friends will tell me. There is nothing sadder than a writer who is dead and does not know it,” explained the author in a meeting in London with journalists in some of the mythical settings of Holmes’s novels.
Pérez-Reverte has emphasized that, at 71 years old, writing is almost a daily obligation — “it forces me to be awake all day,” he pointed out — and he still does not see the day when he puts down the pen, if he well acknowledges that the day it finally happens, it will be “an intellectual tragedy.” In any case, he has stressed that the final decision “depends on the reader.”
“The reader is my friend, but also my obsession and I feel him in front of me looking at me while I write. It is not about stopping writing in case I sell more or not, but rather about not disappointing my friend,” Pérez-Reverte pointed out, who has also acknowledged that he already has “ten or fifteen novels in his head” and that his “tragedy” is that probably several of them “will never be written.”
In any case, he has acknowledged that he hopes to finish an “unfinished business”, the closure of the “Alatriste” saga. “I don’t know what I have left of life, if five, two or twenty years, but I would like to finish it off and, if I live long enough, I want to finish with two books: they are already in my head and just waiting for the moment to be written”, has advanced.
The RAE academic has acknowledged that he decided to end the saga temporarily because “the reader was losing interest”. “I was fine with my character, but I asked about sales and they told me that in the first year of the last installment about 280,000 copies had been sold. I thought it was going down and it was better to leave it, perhaps the market was saturated with Alatriste,” he has explained.
In ‘The final problem’ Pérez-Reverte takes the reader to the 60s with a group of travelers to a Greek island, proposes the resolution of the murder of a wealthy tourist and puts an actor in the doldrums at the head of the investigation who has played the role of Sherlock Holmes many times throughout his career.
The result is a “tribute” to the novel-problem, “not to the crime novel”, as the author has qualified, with a work in which echoes of authors such as Agatha Christie emerge and real characters such as Errol Flynn parade. “The world has changed and that’s why I play with it, introducing perverse elements as a reading encyclopedia”, he remarked.
In fact, Pérez-Reverte – who has acknowledged that it has been the novel that he has rewritten “the most” in his “life” – presents a work “full of nods” to fiction and in which he raises his opposition to ” saturation” of the market with crime novels. “He has abused her,” acknowledged the creator of ‘The Flanders Table’.
“It is devalued by the excess of product. It became fashionable at one point and now everyone wants the detective novel, saturating the market where there is a lot of mediocre: if there are 50 titles, maybe three or four are very good, but everything the noise that there is covers them”, he lamented, clarifying however that the crime novel “is not dead, because there is nothing dead, everything goes out of style and simply returns”.
