El secreto de los flamencos (The secret of the Flemish)

Following on from his explorations of Truth and the clitoris (The Anatomist, 1998) and Creativity and sperm (The Merciful Women, 2000), best-selling Argentine author Federico Andahazi now casts his voyeur's gaze over the world of canvases and oils - with neither a genital nor a body fluid in sight. Set in the 15th century, this historical thriller reminds us that success at painting was once akin to pop stardom and could, even, be a matter of life and death. The latter comes home when maestro Francesco Monterga's prodigious disciple, Pietro de la Chiesa, is violently murdered in his prime. In the background is an ongoing 'war' between, on one side, the leading Italian artists, who have mastered the mathematics of perspective, and the Flemish school, with its alchemic gift for mixing paint to achieve hues and shades mirroring those of the Divine Creation. The ultimate, seemingly unattainable, ambition is to reconcile these talents - and the plot turns on whether young Pietro had come close to mastering the arts of form and content before his untimely slaughter. By rendering this whodunnit in his familiar sensualist‘s prose - baroque, erotically charged and rich in Borges-style allusions -Andahazi manages to have us gripped by questions of dye-mixing and the speed at which paint dries. While evoking the colour and conventions of the period, he sticks closely to the principles of thriller-writing: a twisting plot and filmic scene changes move the narrative along apace and the steamy prose hangs on these bare mechanics like so much erotic drapery. If sometimes formulaic, Andahazi stands out as a natural storyteller and gifted crafter of pastiches in a literary scene traditionally dominated by experiments, textual difficulty and a strict división between literary and popular fiction. Highly translatable - that is, if Europe and elsewhere are in need of historical thrillers about the Renaissance - this Argentine author continues to find his strengths in remote places and epochs. El secreto de los flamencos, even without the sensational biological protagonists of his previous works, is his strongest novel yet.