Portrait of the author Guillermo Busutil. Courtesy of the publisher Fórcola Ediciones.
Books hug, open, flutter (like birds, butterflies, dragonflies), pollinate, correct myopia, offer themselves as planks for shipwrecked people or lanterns for refugees, go through scars, make love, turn into cats or vampires that they jump rope. Books are silkworms or indoor stairs, they risk their lives for an adjective, they set off alarms. And reading opens our relationship to the outside (the place where words breathe, sewn, put at the service of what’s clean, stop counting more than necessary, coo) and with two kinds of ghosts: those of the past and those of the language’s past.
In almost 200 aphorisms, the writer and journalist Guillermo Busutil (National Prize for Cultural Journalism and Storytellers) makes us look at books and experience reading as organic acts, as another way of being the body. Books and reading should not be the refuge of banality (“Abuse frays words”), but that of ethics, politics, pedagogy (“Teaching to read without stepping on words in their shadow”), well-understood madness (“Reading knocks down windmills ‘), spirituality (that ‘silence’ that runs through various texts to create a different relationship with the invisible and the unspeakable), writers (dozens of tributes to deceased contemporaries, including Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Rafael Pérez Estrada, whose spirit hovers over the whole book), eroticism (“literature is the Kama Sutra of language”), poetry (“in which word does the poem express itself?”) or family (“in the loneliness of the afternoon at my mother’s heart was sleeping in a book a”).
It is a series of texts (philosophical pills, micro-stories, greguerías, one-line poems, mini-sociologies, ant trail) that inspire
The book, the reading: the life intensified and the justification of what humanizes the human in the midst of so many other cases that dehumanize it. A series of texts (philosophical pills, micro-stories, greguerías, one-line poems, mini-sociologies, ant trail) that move people because their diagnoses are so accurate, how well the author puts it, and in the angry and sweet way that they must place us at the heart of meaning. A sleepless book (the neologism belongs to the author) and happy.
Author: Guillermo Busutil.
Foreword: Nuria Barrios.
Editorial staff: Forcola, 2022.
Format: Softcover (100 pages, 17.50 euros).
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