An unmarried, professional thirtysomething, she is neither man mad (although she does develop a touching and entirely adult relationship over the course of the novel) nor fashion crazy. Her eccentric but stylish lifestyle as an antique dealer living in her ancestral home in the ancient walled city of Ávila, and working with the international criminal consortium known as the Grupo de Ajedrez (Chess Group) is vividly portrayed. It’s a very readable novel, and Ana is a very personable narrator. It’s a first-person narrative in which we follow our narrator, the thirtysomething antique dealer Ana Galdeano, from her native Ávila to Porto and Weimar on the trail of a mysterious painting that is somehow connected with a fifty-year-old intrigue involving Nazi prisoners, Russian criminals and the real-life mystery of the disappearance of Russia’s opulent Amber Room.

Over the summer, I acquired Asensi’s first two novels, both from the surprisingly well-stocked bookshop inside the Eroski supermarket in Ponteareas, Galicia (!), and read the first, El Salón de Ámbar(1999) over a couple of days sitting by the pool in our (rented!) Galician villa. The novels fall into two categories those in which a contemporary researcher must uncover an historical mystery (usually through stories attached to material artefacts), and those set entirely in the past. Indeed.Īsensi’s work is typified by this kind of connection with the mega-popular Brownesque mystical-cryptographical-historical genre. El último Catón, Asensi’s third novel, appeared in all of these languages, as well as Greek, Romanian, Slovak and also English, as The Last Cato: A Novel, which has i ts very own English-language website (warning – sound!).** In an unmistakeable play for an established audience, the blurb on the website and the front cover claims that ‘it will do for Dante what Dan Brown did for Da Vinci’. It has been published in Portuguese, Polish, French, German and Italian, but not (as far as I can see) English. One thing I noticed from the map is the absence of Catalonia, although half of Asensi’s novels are also available in Catalan versions.* Perhaps unsurprisingly, Catalonia doesn’t appear to count as ‘internacional,’ but then again, nor do the Catalan versions appear under ‘Spanish editions’ – so as far as Editorial Planeta, who sponsor the website, are concerned, it seems they are largely invisible…Īsensi’s claim to an international profile rests primarily on three novels: Iacobus (2000), El último Catón (2001) and Todo bajo el cielo (2006) Iacobus, her second novel, is described on her website as ‘La novela que abrió las puertas del mercado internacional a Matilde Asensi’ (the novel that opened the doors of the international market to Matilde Asensi). Interestingly, other than South Korea, these are primarily in Europe, although the few English-language versions have come via the US rather than Britain, and there are both Portuguese and Brazilian editions of O último Catão.

Meanwhile, Asensi’s webpage is entirely in Spanish, although there is an ‘internacional’ page, where you can see a map with the countries where her books have been published. If you clicked on the Ruiz Zafón link above, you’ll have noticed that not only is it a fully English-language website, but it even has a British domain (.co.uk) similarly, while Falcones himself doesn’t seem to have an author website, the Catedral del mar website is available in English, Castilian and Catalan. Is it the case now that an author hasn’t really made it until national success turns into global recognition? If so, I would argue that Asensi is still some way behind her two male peers, particularly with regard to their relationship with the Anglophone world. Certainly Asensi usually appears below Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Ildefonso Falcones on the annual lists of Spain’s bestselling authors, but then both Falcones and Ruiz Zafón made their names largely from a single, doorstopping novel, while Asensi has published eight novels since 1999 at a rate of more or less one a year, so maybe there’s a cumulative effect? In any case, hers is an interesting case study for considering the whole question of how a national bestselling author becomes a global bestselling author, especially given the complexities of Spain’s cultural geopolitics. Damn! I wrote this whole post and poof! it was gone … so … I promised a couple of months back to talk a bit more about Matilde Asensi, who has been one of Spain’s bestselling authors for around 10 years now, but who I’d never come across until I began looking at Spain’s bestseller lists for an article I was researching earlier this year.Īsensi is described on her website as ‘la autora española más leída’ (the most-read Spanish author), although it’s slightly unclear whether that’s a gender-inflected claim or not.

El salon de ambar matilde asensi