Carmen Mola, in the end, this name contains everything, the indecency, the self-infatuation and also the supposed superiority, the whole little scandal that has now poured into Spain’s literary business. The story of Carmen Mola began so promisingly. The Spanish author has celebrated incredible success with her books in recent years. Her debut “La novia gitana” entered the top ten of the bestseller list in 2018, stayed there for a surprisingly long time and sold more than 500,000 times. The same happened to her next two novels. So far only the first book has been published in German, with the pithy title “He wants to see her die”.
Carmen Mola’s books alternate between crime thriller and thriller, their most striking features are probably their bloodthirstiness and the attention to detail with which even the most repulsive scenes are portrayed. Nevertheless, the author and her books were fascinating for literary criticism – or perhaps because of it. Because everyone wanted to find out who this author was who, with her cruel fictions, had such success with readers. Within a few months, a similar hype developed around Carmen Mola in Spain as elsewhere around Elena Ferrante. The fact that “Carmen Mola” was not her real name and that the author preferred anonymity was part of the fascination.
The author played skillfully with her identity and its disguise, with the attention of critics and the public. Despite all secrecy, Carmen Mola gave regular interviews in which she answered questions in writing by email. So she also commented on why she is hiding her real name: A little coquettishly, she stated that she did not want her work colleagues, friends or mother to know that she had such cruel fantasies. After all, she is a completely conventional woman in her real life.
So much for the self-humility of a lady who was soon said to live in Madrid as a university professor and mother of three children. Incidentally, she is said to have penned three bestsellers, one every year. Nobody was surprised.
Thought wrong. When the Premio Planeta was awarded in Barcelona on Friday evening, everything was discovered. Spain’s most important literary prize – incidentally the highest endowed award for writers worldwide with one million euros (10,000 euros more than the Nobel Prize for Literature) – went to Carmen Mola that evening for her as yet unpublished manuscript “La Bestia”, a historical novel about Madrid during a cholera epidemic in 1834. Once again, young women die from cruel crimes. Carmen Mola stays true to her genre.
But after that evening everything is different. Three men came on stage who actually earned their living writing scripts for television series such as “Hospital Central”, a Spanish version of “Emergency Room”: Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero revealed the secret on this occasion that they have been writing under the pseudonym “Carmen Mola” for years, and are now talking in interviews about the challenges of writing together. And about the fact that they came up with their pseudonym very spontaneously, it took less than two minutes.
In retrospect, of course, the name was obvious. Literally translated, Carmen Mola means nothing more than “Carmen likes”, or even more literally: Carmen turns on. A name that speaks volumes, because Carmen Mola was well received. Maybe because you suspected a woman behind it? Like every scandal, this one also tells something about the environment in which it took place. The literary business in Spain, like elsewhere, is always interested in catchy narratives beyond the literary content.
For a long time it was the other way around: women had to hide behind pseudonyms like George Eliot
Nationwide, the commentators quote the history of literature to show that it is at least disreputable when writing men hide behind women’s names. After all, literary work was reserved for men for a long time, which is why women had to pretend to be men. Just think of Mary Anne Evans, whose books no one would have known today if she hadn’t renamed herself George Eliot, of the Brontë sisters or Siri Hustvedt, who repeatedly had to defend herself in interviews against the suspicion that her husband was in reality Paul Auster wrote her books.
And the other reflexes also come up: There you see it again, now the balance of power is reversing, now men have to pretend to be women in order to be successful, it is said on the side of those who see the reality in the literary prize juries and the boardrooms of the Publishers are able to hide. The lesson revealed in the nom de Plume “Carmen Mola” is much simpler: three middle-aged men from television entertainment who write crime novels are not nearly as interesting for the literary world as those Madrid professor-wife-mother who are secretly thinks up splatter scenes.
That reveals a lot about the image of women of the three gentlemen who came up with this story – it is no coincidence that the investigative commissioner in the novels was made up as a bitchy alcoholic. The author Carmen Mola herself seemed sublime in the face of such excesses. She only surrendered to her abysses in literature. And so, when the Spaniards started their summer vacation this year, she recommended the novel “Pleamar” by a certain Antonio Mercero, an author who is otherwise known as the scriptwriter of a certain hospital series, in various magazines and daily newspapers in the country. It is an “ideal book to read by the sea”. Mercero’s book then caught up a few places on the bestseller list. But Carmen Mola’s titles were still ahead.