A Hitchcockian investigation of identity

It is not the first time that Victor Garcia Tur (Barcelona, ​​​​1981) works with Hitchcockian materials. In The birds (2015), his first novel, already made variations based on the homonymous film by the English filmmaker, based on the story of Daphne du Maurier. He took some plot motifs, part of the cast of characters, the general atmosphere and symbolic weight, and created a work of his own that, with the original, had as many points in common (an inexplicable change in the natural environment causes anguish and tension in the human landscape) that Turco felt and made specular divergences (Hitchcock is nowhere to be found). The merit of the novel is that it was able to play with the raw material without subordinating itself to it. Hitchcock was the starting point, a reference, not an idol to emulate or simply pay homage to.

A The cloisters, Garcia Tur revisits Hitchcock and more or less repeats the operation already done in The birds. As he himself explains in the "Author's Note" that closes the book, in addition to the film Vertigo (based on the notable novel of the same name written by the Boileau-Narcejac tandem, now in Catalan in Vienna), other cinematographic references that have been taken into account are Mullholland Drive of David Lynch and The devilish ones by Henri Georges Clouzot. All three films work with the codes of the crime genre, but distort reality, with a non-realistic will: Hitchcock is symbolic and almost supernatural, Clouzot is gruesome and gothic sinister, and Lynch is existential and abstract. Garcia Tur performs the same distorting maneuver. The resource he uses is drugs in the incipient context of counterculture and psychedelia in the United States of the 1960s. A vague feeling of bad trip paranoia runs through the book from cover to cover.

The plot of'The cloisters, which has more mirror-image divergences than points in common with Hitchcock's film, opens with a seemingly cheerful and harmless scene. Two young women (the idea of the double, as well as moral and intentional duplicity, are central to the story) and Muntadas, a son of Catalan exiles in France who came to New York to try to make a living, prepare to take LSD and experience a psychotropic and sensual night. However, things don't work out, and a disgruntled Muntadas leaves the apartment and goes into a bar for a drink. There, a stranger makes him an indecent proposition: she'll pay him money if he drugs a married woman and takes her to bed so that her millionaire husband can have proof that she's an adulterer and, thus, divorce her.

A profiteer who may be profited from

From then on, the novel adopts tones, rhythms, and themes typical of the crime genre, whose codes and rules Garcia Tur masters. As in Hitchcock's film, the protagonist's interest in the woman he must follow—here, manipulate and deceive—leads to a growing fascination and, later, to an obsessive love. Two other Hitchcockian elements—also common in Hollywood police films of the 40s and 50s—that the author plays with are the motif of the wife who is perhaps being poisoned by her husband and the character of the opportunist who is perhaps being taken advantage of, the shrewd one who is perhaps being taken for a ride.

All in The cloisters revolves around the question of identity: the psychological identity of Maud Thubert, the woman Muntadas must deceive and drug, and we don't know if she's a victim or a madwoman or something else, and the personal and national-cultural identity of Muntadas himself. It is here that Garcia Tur makes a brilliant contribution. To the labyrinth of psychological, criminal, and symbolic identities of the original source material, a murky and traumatic labyrinth, he adds the identity trauma of Muntadas, the son of exiles, uprooted and of a humiliated and vanished Catalan identity. That the novel culminates in the Cloisters, the New York museum where the cloister of the monastery of Sant Miquel de Cuixà is displayed, decontextualized, among other medieval pieces seized from Catalonia, has a symbolic significance as evident as it is powerful.

The prose with which Garcia Tur conveys everything is sinuous but also directed, graceful, and intelligent. Just as clever as every aspect and detail of the novel is.