El hombre del corazón negro (review)

Ángela Vallvey, winner of the Premio Nadal in 2002 for Los estados carenciales and runner up for the Premio Planeta in 2008 with Muerte entre poetas, centers her latest novel on the Russian mafia and its activities in Spain. Like all of her previous novels, Vallvey uses her text to comment on and critique the state of things in contemporary Spanish society. The novel’s theme is the slavery of young girls from Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet bloc countries, who are exploited by mafias and used as prostitutes in Spain. Treated like animals, these young women are forced to service as many as 20–30 men a day with no means of escape. Vallvey includes an actual article from the Spanish newspaper La Razón, which details this trend. Roughly 700,000 women and children are deceived in their home countries with the promise of a better life somewhere else, but instead are forced into prostitution. The inclusion of the article with its current statistics underlines the need to draw attention to this matter and the necessity of change and more aggressive prosecution of the perpetrators. It is of interest that Vallvey is a regular commentator for La Razón and writes habitually about Spanish politics and current trends in contemporary Spain.

Although the novel does concern a very serious theme, the author skillfully maintains the reader’s interest throughout by encasing the plot within the format of a detective novel. The novel opens with the disappearance of a widow and her various cats and although at first glance this seems disconnected from the main text, it is in fact germane because the widow’s neighbors are Russian. The widow is a close friend of the mother of a judge of Spanish and Polish descent, Marcos Drabina, who is asked to investigate a case of corruption and money laundering within the Russian mafia in Spain. A mixed race detective and karate expert, Sigrid Azadoras, is ordered to participate in the case with the idea of entrapping one of the head honchos of the Russian mafia while he practices karate at a local gym. Sigrid’s colored skin is a topic of much discussion amongst her colleagues and other Spaniards. Vallvey offers a criticism of racism in Spanish society where cultural and racial stereotypes still abound. Sigrid and Marcos become colleagues and work closely together to solve the case and provide the novel with a romantic subtext.

Vallvey adeptly alternates between the narrations of various characters and their stories. All are related in the third person and provide the reader with background as to the events unfolding. Polina is a young teen, age 15, from Moldavia, who is forced into prostitution because she answers an ad in her local paper offering her a babysitting position in Turkey. She is desperate to escape the penury in Moldavia and leaps at the opportunity to leave the country like most of her peers. Vallvey does a wonderful job, through this fictional account, of explaining why so many young girls end up as prostitutes. The other narrations include the Russian mafia boss and various other Russians and people from the ex-Soviet bloc. Feruza, a principal character, escaped from Chernobyl and is convinced she is suffering from the effects of the nuclear disaster, even though she was quite far from the reactor. Vallvey’s inclusion of world events and politics and their repercussion on Spanish immigration is an astute commentary on the state of society today. Immigration in Spain is a great concern for Spanish citizens and statistically most of the prostitutes in Spain are foreigners who are exploited. The money that the Russian mafias bring in is used to purchase real estate in Southern Spain. Much like Vallvey sustains in her novel, everything is connected.

El hombre del corazón negro is a book that would serve well in a contemporary literature class and also a culture and civilization class in an American university. It describes and analyzes contemporary Spanish culture...