Lists are uncomfortable, but they are magnetic: their head and tail are the semblance of clarity that each classification conveys. Babelia's list of the best books of the year comes home at Christmas as a tradition to close the cultural calendar and has the advantage and disadvantage of being consensual. Too many readers vote – every year we update the census – for the table, which adds up the votes for weeks, not to end up showing something that could be called literary common sense.
The most voted books of the last decade have not stopped being read, nor have their authors' reputations been questioned, showing that the critical support they received was due to their quality. It is also worrying that the relevance of literature written by women and the rethinking of the cultural canon in recent years have had no influence on the choice of the best book. In this sense, too, the lists make it clear: two out of ten are an anomaly in every respect.
Perhaps what is most significant about the list of the best books of the last decade is the centrality that two young writers of the transition have achieved in the culture of democracy: Javier Marías and Rafael Chirbes. These are two very different novelists who do not follow the same aesthetic tradition, but both share a very high ambition for moral inquiry, using impeccable prose as a tool. Marías rose to prominence very early on, and Chirbes approached the core of the canon from the fringes. The unexpected thing in the case of the Valencian writer is that this final canonization came about through the critical success of his diaries.
2022
Diaries. To the lost times 3 and 4
Rafael Chirbes
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The quality of the memoirs of Rafael Chirbes (1949-2015), demonstrated in his first volume published in 2021, did not diminish in the second part, and so it was no surprise that the author of On the Shore's diaries once again increased in value won first place, ahead of excellent books by other renowned authors. “The addiction that arises from the author's intimacy does not depend on the tolerance or harmony that the reader discovers with his obsessive and bitter opinions, but on the fact that he witnesses the exposure of the many phobias and fears of a literary being “that will also be able to enjoy the reality with the pen in the hand, the physical pleasure of using it on paper and its narcotic roar,” wrote Jordi Gracia in his notes for the Babelia special by a year ago, which also highlighted “the dizziness of immersing yourself in an intimacy that was punished, unsafe and often angry.”
2021
Sara Mesa, 2020 winner, acknowledged that the “Event of the Year” was the first part of the memoirs of Rafael Chirbes, an author who previously took first place in 2013 with “On the Shore”. “Many of us have read them eagerly and had many conversations about them,” he wrote in Babelia, an opinion shared by numerous lovers of literature in general and of notes as personal as they illuminate life and work in particular the author of Crematorium, who died of lung cancer in 2015. The pessimism, loneliness and dirtiness that these notebooks convey are fueled by many tears, which sometimes make him appear inconsiderate of others and almost always of himself, Mesa noted.
2020
“Years ago I started writing a story that I wasn’t sure where it would take me. It took a long time and I made a lot of mistakes, although I also achieved some successes that prevented me from giving up and throwing everything away. I picked up the novel and put it down again several times, writing other things in between,” said Sara Mesa (1976) herself when asked for a text about her illustrious number one novel of 2020. And there is no doubt that all these efforts and insecurities, perhaps common to a multitude of titles in literary history, were worth it: a love became a success that represented “a pure joy for the reader” because it ” “maintained a very high narrative standard,” said Carlos Pardo. in his review of the book.
2019
Luis Landero (1948) is regularly on all the best books of the year lists when he releases a new book. And in 2019 he achieved undeniable success with Lluvia fina, a story that reveals countless blood secrets and, as Ángel L. Prieto de Paula explained, refers to the literary debut of the Extremaduran writer Juegos de la muerte late (1989). Our expert summed it up this way: “We are faced with a masterful story that shows how precarious and ultimately fictitious any stability is.” All you have to do is rummage through the past, any past, and despondency or madness emerge .”
2018
“Ordesa is the shipwreck letter we have been waiting for for years. She reached the bookstores on a wave of foam, which, as she retreated, left her on the shore, left among a remarkable mass of miscellaneous remains. It was distinguished neither by its title nor its cover, nor by the name of its author, who was not known outside certain circles. But it was enough to read the first page to realize that this cry for help came from the depths of ourselves.” This is how Juan José Millás explained in December 2018 the meaning of a title that landed at number one in our experts' list of favorites.
2017
Javier Marías (1951-2022), who died last September, was also a regular at the annual literary summaries. Three years after the publication of our best book of the year, This is how evil begins, he returned in 2014 to deliver a great novel: Berta Isla, which also won the Critics' Prize for Castilian Fiction in 2017 According to the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the move Characters fewer and fewer, but more and more things happen. “And they are all interesting: they all challenge us, question us, shake us and move us. This is the case in Berta Isla, this wonderful novel that is in dialogue with “Your Face of Tomorrow” but also with “This is how the bad things begin”.
2016
“She raised her four children alone, she battled alcoholism, she suffered from painful sclerosis since childhood, she had countless temporary jobs,” Andrea Aguilar told us about this author in 2015, months before this book hit Spanish bookstores. And she also told us that the author “published only 77 stories, collected in half a dozen books.” Less than a thousand copies of the latter were sold.” This means that success came late, very late, for Lucia Berlin (1936-2004). The groundbreaking 2016 book was published in Spain 12 years after his death. “I don't think I have ever read a more intelligent, sensitive, tender and courageous woman than Lucia Berlin,” wrote José María Guelbenzu in his review of this collection of short stories. He added: “Everything Berlin tells smacks of truth so much that the use of his personal experience in writing his stories is obvious.”
2015
Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia (1941-2017) constructed an alter ego using his middle name and maternal surname, a character that appeared frequently in his novels. And he also had an intimate life, recorded in diaries that spanned more than half a century, between 1957 – barely a teenager – and 2015, two years before his death. The first volume of these memoirs, entitled “The Diaries of Emilio Renzi,” was published last year. Years of training that turned out to be the best title in the course. In successive years the second volume was published with the subtitle “The Happy Years” and the third “A Day in the Life”. “Between astonishment and discovery, Emilio Renzi is the best Piglia, the clear-sighted one, the one with the precise word and the anecdote with long consequences,” said the Peruvian writer Iván Thays in the pages of Babelia.
2014
In a year in which “important books by important writers were published: Marsé, Muñoz Molina, Landero, Cercas, Luis Mateo Díez, Gimferrer in poetry, Ferrer Lerín, Molina Foix, Guelbenzu…”, the writer Javier Marías Madrid expressed surprise about the result, as the author himself admitted in an interview with Javier Rodríguez Marcos, a few days after his book was chosen best of the year by the EL PAÍS experts. A novel set in transition that uses the secrets of a marriage to take advantage of the opportunity of historical memory.
2013
The renowned author of Crematorio (2007), in which he delves into the terrible world of unscrupulous speculators sucking blood on the Mediterranean coast, presents in 2013 the terrible consequences of the brutal crisis that Spain suffered in the following years. “No exit. The present is the story of a man who ruins himself by falling into the temptation of greed. “The past is a father, raised in old revolutionary dreams, who, because of his own resentment and distance, becomes a despicable one Reality gradually separated from life,” summarized Luis García Montero in his review, for which he received the best book of 2013 and numerous cultural supplements.
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