Covers of the four novels.
Fifteen days ago, in the last issue of our newsletter entitled “Caloric Dystopias”, I wrote about various dystopias, but also about the position of those writers and critics who love to resist the fact that this is what literature is about , what it’s always been about: whatever.
Well – it seems that there are those who still have doubts – before we talk about the first novels of four authors who contribute to the cartography of our literature, as well as the first novel of an author whose work has been read and reread by everyone should be. I would like to point out another characteristic of those authors and critics who refuse to allow literature to be about anything, because they want it to be about only and exclusively what it is about.
“If the story had gone better…” or “if the author had chosen a different voice to tell what…” or “he could have designed his characters like that…” or “what a missed opportunity, not the last decade of the 20th century. ” instead of …”: Talk about what is not, what is not there, what is not in the book, but is in the minds of those writers and critics who do not want that Literature is a space of freedom, but rather a private hunting ground. Can you imagine that to talk about the heat, one of those summer days when you melt, we would talk about the cold that doesn’t exist, or that to talk about the fish we eat, would talk about the incomparable? Taste of grasshoppers?
Of course, what I have just written is not just a follow-up to our previous newsletter: I wrote it above all because this mechanism, which I have barely described, has too often been the mechanism by which it is being used by new ones Authors attacked when not made invisible – and especially by new authors who are not so new and not new at all, and also too often postpones (or prevents) any form of recognition and, even worse, something akin to consecration – . This happened, among so many other cases, with that of Sara Gallardo, whose books – from that first and fabulous novel, Enero, about a sixteen-year-old teenager living in the middle of the country who discovers that she is pregnant , has to face the loneliness of the world and the new edition of which has just come into my hands – quite a few writers and critics then, but also later, decided to evaluate based on what was not in them and not based on what was was there – how right Mujica Lainez was years later when, referring to Eisejuaz, he wrote another Gallardo novel that we should all read again and again: “What a strange and beautiful book you have created! I can’t imagine how you came up with it or how you dared to do it. What audacity! I hope people understand the value of your writing. I hope you leave the surprise of the first pages behind and immerse yourself in its astonishing uniqueness.”
Four innovations
This is obviously not about the assumption that first novels can (and almost always should) have gaps, gaps or cracks, but rather about talking about what lies between these spaces, what creates these gaps and what the existence of these Gaps allow for cracks in what the first novels, if they are really interesting, are in themselves; of the material – both history and language – from which they are made, for example Araneae by the Mexican Nayeli García, I call it love, by the Colombian Pedro Carlos Lemus, The Left Side of the Sun, by the Mexican Cristian Lagunas and Infértil des Peruvian writer Rosario Yori.
In Araneae, the protagonist, whose father abandoned her when she was little, learns that he died a few years ago and, against all logic, decides to look for him: she is not looking for a person, it is clear, she is looking for an absence and that’s one of the things that makes this book special; The other is the use of language – tense at all times, but also fragile: like the thread of spiders and insects that appear throughout the novel, to the point that, as in reality itself, one cannot be sure when they will are true and when not.
In I Will Call It Love, Lemus is part of a breakup to be told through Pedro, who could well be his alter ego, with an incredible ability to negotiate emotional distance – perhaps the book’s greatest virtue: how it brings it It brings us to that reader closer and how it distances him, which puts us in the very difficult space of what is proposed – a double story or rather the concave and convex side of human relationships: abandonment and protection, renunciation and refuge.
The Left Side of the Sun, winner of the latest edition of the Mauricio Achar Prize, has opened the season with transparent and clear prose and a truly impressive rhythm, in addition to a use of language and silence, typical of someone who has a very unique ear, that Yukio Mishima spent in Mexico to decipher various aspects of his life, his love and his desires.
Barely telling the direction in which desires can develop, whether natural or forced, and how this tendency affects the rest of life, he creates in the reader one of his greatest virtues: the calm in the midst of catastrophe – the feeling of being before to stand in front of the calmest rider in the world, but also in front of a runaway animal.
coordinates
De Enero, like Eisejuaz, comes in different editions, but the one that fell into my hands this last time was Laguna Libros. Araneae was published by Barret and Lata Peinada. I’ll Call It Love as well as The Left Side of the Sun and Infértil were published by Random House in Colombia, Mexico and Peru.
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