Institut Ramon LLull

What are the odds that two giant figures of the tumultuous twentieth century would hail from the same tiny town of Santa Margalida? And that their trajectories would be so different yet they would maintain a relationship throughout their lives? This is the improbable yet real premise that sparked Kings of the World: the thread that linked those Joans—March and Mascaró—the former a multimillionaire banker to Franco and the latter a world-renowned Sanskrit scholar. March was a broker who accepted a bribe from Churchill and Mascaró was the translator who translated Bhagavad Gita into English. Both men were, in their own way, searching for freedom: March sought it through money, Mascaró through knowledge and love. Both believed that evil was a result of human stupidity, but March saw in war an opportunity for profit.

Alzamora takes the amazing intersecting biographies of these two “great” men, and fashions an intricate realist novel primarily narrated by two characters: Emili Tremulles, March’s right-hand man at the bank, and Kathleen Ellis, Mascaró’s wife and mother to his fraternal twins. The book recreates at length a conversation between the two men in midlife, where they discuss humanity’s greatest ethical conundrums, each of them defending his beliefs and justifying his actions. Alzamora lays bare how brilliance, which both men had in spades, was still subject to morality, as he poses the question of what success (financial, spiritual ... ) truly means.