The distant country of ponds

The Far Country of Ponds is a crime novel by writer Lorenzo Silva published in 1998 and winner of the El Ojo Crítico Narrative Award. It is also the The first novel in the series starring researchers Rubén Bevilacqua and Virginia Chamorro, officers of the Civil Guard. The title refers to Austria, where the murder victim comes from.

Plot

The Civil Guard discovers in a town in the south of Mallorca the body of Eva Heydrich, a foreigner, who has been shot dead and hung naked from a ceiling crossbar in the living room of her friend Regina Bolzano's summer residence, also a foreigner from Switzerland. Since Regina Bolzano has fled, Commander Zaplana assumes that this woman is the murderer of Eva Heydrich, but cannot discover any trace of the fugitive. Days before, the Austrian consulate has pressured the Spanish police to find the author. That is why the special investigator Rubén Bevilacqua is sent to Mallorca to look for Bolzano, for the first time with an assistant: the guard Virginia Chamorro, doing the matter incognito as tourists. As Commander Pereira explains: We have rented you a chalet. You will be there locating witnesses and snooping around the places where the suspect and the victim could have gone (Silva, Lejano País, 2010 edition, p. 30-31).

Assessment of the work

The novel is a masterpiece in every respect. The first chapter is excellent due to the macabre and ironic point of view with which the writer Lorenzo Silva recounts the discovery of the dead woman. He has the words in colloquial language of Perelló, an old non-commissioned officer who has seen many things and seems to have no respect for the victim, to the guard Satrústegui: What a pair of pears ; Recognize, my brigade, that the girl is not in her prime . Also the architecture of the first investigations of the agents Bevilaqua and Chamorro and the hunt for the murderers that begins in the middle of the novel. There are other meetings in the ironic style of the first chapter and some surprising turns that amplify the tension.

The criminalist energy of the work is produced by the contradictions of the case. For example, in this discussion between Bevilaqua and Chamorro: «Let's assume that Regina didn't do it. She was done by someone else, [...] who should be better off thinking she was Regina. [...] »–« If that other acted in collusion with Regina, she could have asked him to do something that would exclude her from her. » – "Sure, like killing her with a gun full of her fingerprints." (Silva, Lejano País, 2010 edition, p. 46). But the final solution of the novel has little suspense. The author has a murderer that he has not presented as a suspect, with no indications and few allusions in the course of actions. It's impossible to deduce the perpetrator in advance, but a quality crime novel has to lay some clear trails for readers who want to prove or disprove murder theories. In this work the murderer falls like a stone from the sky and is like the "famous gardener" who killed the owner of the castle unexpectedly. As Perelló said in one of the final chapters: «It was a devilish riddle. There are only a couple of coincidences, but without them there was no Christian who could figure it out." (Silva, Lejano País, 2010 edition, p. 270). The same thing Bevilacqua said in the same chapter: "he fired into the air [...] [without] learning that he had hit the target." (Silva, Lejano País, 2010 edition, p. 236).

Name of the main character

The name of the victim Eva Heydrich has two parts. The given name refers to Adam's wife, Eve, who committed the first sin in Eden. The surname may refer to the head of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, one of the ideologues of the Holocaust. The combination of names is striking and probably an indirect characterization of the victim, alluding to her promiscuous and provocative behavior.