El Hombre De Mi Vida

With this volume, the Spanish author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán had already written 22 books. And the name Pepe Carvalho reached approximately 1.5 million copies sold. It can be said that the writer took things philosophically. In "The Man of My Life" there is less action than in the early installments. There is a more detached perspective than at the beginning, and it is a sort of rethinking of the character: there are moments when spy satellites and private security companies threaten to nullify the detective’s life.
With this volume, the idea of the return prompted a review of the entire strategy of the cycle: from this perspective, it was a story that presented difficulties, highlighted by the character Charo, who was no longer so young due to the time passed since her debut. This fact would condition the structure of the novel: however, the writer imagined another love story in which the character Yes reappears, in turn becoming a core element for a spy fiction plot.

In this book, Pepe Carvalho’s appearance is, in a sense, that of a retiree. A man growing old: after verifying that his own records are in a precarious state, he reconnects with his city, changed following the Olympic Games. At the same time, an intrigue of sects and nationalisms unfolds before his eyes. As the writer Vazquez Montalban explained: "It is somewhat a diagnosis of the end of the millennium, which is basically a great market for new nationalisms and new religions. Every day there is a new religion, with increasingly obscure reasons, for example. Every day we see that Benetton has invented a new religion to launch a new clothing line. It is undoubtedly opportunism, but the old religions are so ancient that deep down one hopes to see a new one with Sharon Stone as Pope!" [...] Carvalho has grown old and it was inevitable that a revision of the past would be made: the story moves through the city of Barcelona and is a review of the period when he was a CIA spy. The character returns with the intention of brightening his life so that he might have a more dignified old age, but he becomes involved in an intelligence effort by the Generalitat; throughout the fiction, an important love story with another figure from the past emerges and intertwines.

Even though the novel deeply involves people like Jordi Pujol and Josep Tarradellas, Vazquez Montalban defends himself because he did not want to write a "roman à clef": rather, throughout the writing, there are a number of possible characters, but no single representation is specific. This might be more of an invitation to anyone reading the book to identify the characters. ... The story is set during the nationalism of the end of the century. Vázquez Montalbán states that "Carvalho is a crab," but he seems to move like a fish out of water. He takes positions distant from everything and feels sympathy for oppressed nationalism; in any case, in any nationalism, an executive eventually emerges whose game is money: such a design on nationalism would have been an executive move to the despair of traditional nationalists.
According to Vázquez Montalbán, in this book, religiosity and focused nationalisms are a new neo-Cathar sect. And Catalanism itself emerges at the end of the millennium as a consequence of the disappearance of absolute truths, as well as the threat that globalization brings. However, the events are a symbol of the final phase: in part, the new announcement of detective Carvalho will repeat this same theme. An outing that could have been his last, in which the detective will make his return and a trip around the globe, where he will revisit the topics of an invasive globalization.

In conclusion, it can be stated that the background of the story shows much independence and the need to build one's own world. And in this book, the character Carvalho has demonstrated once again that he has a world all his own.