2023-11-13 15:16:39
One of the two authors of I stole the Voynich manuscript, Salvador Casas, has described the novel awarded with this year’s Empordà Prize as a work “with an intrigue format with pretensions of Best Seller”.
Casas, who signs with Josep Torrent, has just seen the book published, which narrates the fictitious disappearance of a real manuscript, the Voynich, which is preserved in the Beinecke Library at the American University of Yale.
The mystery that hangs over this text is real, a succession of 15th century characters in an unidentified language accompanied by drawings of unknown plants, zodiac signs and products that relate to alchemy.
In an interview, Casas explains that “the voinyxologist is Josep Torrent”, who was head of the Local Police of Olot and winner of various prizes as a writer, who proposed to him the idea of working together on a novel that spin on this manuscript.
For Casas, the Voynich is “the passive protagonist” of the novel, which they have surrounded with “a credible plot and endowed with the style of the Best Sellers”, a bestseller condition that sounds complicated, but to which would welcome
This author is complemented by someone like Torrent, “who knows very well how the police and judicial systems work”, while his contribution has more to do with character development and the “darker” part of the book.
To respond to this sought-after format, both have devised a novel of 402 pages that is “long, but very good to read” and whose virtue is that “the reader never gets lost”, and for this reason they describe before each chapter the exact moment in which the action occurs. They also travel to very diverse landscapes ranging from New Zealand to the Philippines and include the Aosta Valley and Sicily in Italy and Girona and the Empordà in Catalonia, as well as the south of France.
Casas declares himself “very grateful to the Empordà” for the award, which has a “significant” remuneration of 7,000 euros, obtained despite being, in his opinion, “two non-media authors”.
Some of the characters that appear in the novel are real, like that of a bookstore that exists in Girona, La 22, and also landscapes and streets that are described in detail. It has been on sale for a few days to get reactions from readers, but, from the jury, I have stolen the Voynich manuscript deserved words of praise, as Salvador Casas emphasizes.
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