Savoring the Past: Collective Amnesica, Consumer Culture and Gastronomic Memory in Vazquez Montalban's

The Spanish author Manuel Vazquez Montalbin adopts and adapts the style and essence of noir, from fUmas well as novel, to project a post-Franco Spain overcome with crime, corruption and uncertainty. Vazquez Montalban's writing ranges from avant-garde poetry to experimental novels to philosophical essays and investigative journalism, yet his detective series fuses hard-boiled realism with postmodern explorations of truth, politics and writing. His detective, Pepe Carvalho, a Galician who lives in Barcelona (a.k.a. "charnego"), possesses a complex identity that includes a contradictory past as an Communist protestor during the 1950s in Francoist Spain, then as a CIA assassin in the United States yet who now prefers a safe, cynical distance from the trappings of any ideology that purports to project "truth." Vazquez Montalban injects the "noir" realism of the Carvalho series with irony, iconoclasm, intertextuality and self-reflection in a postmodern investigation that questions cultural codes, defies genre categorization and confuses the distinction between "High" and "Popular" art.! Carvalho's distrust and rejection of culture is best articulated in the detective's two most striking idiosyncrasies: his 'penchant' for burning books and his passion for gourmet cooking.2