archipelago by Mariana Enriquez seems to me to be a great biographical essay about how a reader is formed, how a female reader is formed. How a tradition comes into being and how a tradition is integrated into one’s own biography. It has to do with the fantasy genre, but also beyond it. I think it’s basically about world building. A map of a library and the library as if it were a world. As an object it is very powerful.
Proust by Edmund White seems to me to be a very precise, very quick biographical essay that, in addition to incorporating data, also takes into account the essential elements and with this and with the characters creates a map of Paris at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 20th century. An outstanding work that deserves to be read. A reference in the genre of writer biographies.
the book Carlito borderline by Carlos Busqued takes the old Busqued blogs and turns them into a story, so to speak. There are parts of his old novels, but above all an author’s search for a style. And their phobias and their philias. Busqued published only two books, but did impressive work. Also on social networks that save this secret work that is no longer secret.
dry livesby Graciliano Ramos, is a short gem. Short because it takes up a few pages, but equally short because it is a few words: Ramos wrote in the reverse form of the verb that so often predominates in South American letters. In a style that advances through subtraction, Ramos devoted himself to cutting and polishing the raw rock of his narrative material – the arid sertão of the Brazilian northeast, the underbelly of postcard beaches – until, as he put it, he arrived at “a little book without landscapes, without dialogue. And without love.” Until we reach the sharpest stone in Brazilian literature.
The great chronicler Rubem Braga met the author of dry lives in 1937. They both lived in a modest boarding house in Rio de Janeiro. Penniless and still bald – he had just been released from the Ilha Grande political prison – Ramos came up with the idea of publishing stories in newspapers and making some money. The first, “Ballena,” has a skinny dog as its protagonist. It arose from the memory of an animal sacrificed in the interior of Pernambuco and paved the way for the following stories, which reached Ramos in a different order when they were finally published as a novel in 1938.
Novel? Yes, says Braga, but a “separable” novel, made up of movable fragments. A modern formal solution to take into account the tenuous adventure – escape from drought and hunger – that lies ahead of the poor heroes.
The sequence of chapters corresponds less to the stages of a plot than to the rotation between different points of view: from the cowboy Fabiano to his wife Vitória, from the two skinny children to the dog Ballena. Without epic or local color, without sentimentality or regional melodies, Graciliano Ramos has written a succinct book about the violence at the root of our nations. There aren’t many with the same tenor: I’m thinking of the slaughterhouse by Esteban Echeverría and in Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. That means nothing dry lives.
My picks for books of the year are: Shadow ticketby Thomas Pynchon, and Terminal alphabetby Josep Palacios.
It’s hard not to read Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel without considering the possibility that it could be his last novel. Perhaps it’s not a bad perspective: it allows us to see more clearly his insistence on a poetics of youth (what Dwight Garner called his “resistance to the development of a late style”), which means embarking on a carousel of puns, insane situations and protagonists half learned and half metaphysical, and witnessing a new intersection of noir – this time with the world of Wisconsin cheese production.
Terminal alphabet It is the third and final edition of a work that Josep Palàcios, another reclusive cult author, wrote and rewrote between 1987 and 1989 and which found its final form here in 2015. What begins as an almost Oulipian challenge – to write a page for each letter of the alphabet – becomes an opportunity to establish a poetics that is at once a laboratory of the possibilities of history as essay and of the essay as paraphrase.
The translation into Spanish is, in my opinion, an important event. Or at least the opportunity to read one of the most brilliant and unknown writers in Catalan literature.
Alphabetical diaryby Sheila Heti. A procedural book: The author writes a diary for ten years, then fragments it into sentences and arranges them alphabetically, now without date or order. The result is a cubist self-portrait and a possible synecdoche of 21st century literature. Unfortunately, Lumen’s Spanish translation emphasizes the outcome rather than the process, losing some of the intentionally arbitrary nature that drives the project and energizes the resulting text.
paradeby Rachel Cusk. Libros del Asteroide continues to publish the work of this author who, since the publication of A contrauz a decade ago, has built a literary voice out of the suppression of her “personal” voice, a literary magic trick that has been completely exposed. The invention of a narrative form and its surprising application is so rare that Cusk becomes an author we should not lose sight of. Another great example of portraying the contemporary mind through writing.
hungerby Knut Hamsun. Aquelarre Publishing is publishing a new direct translation from Norwegian of this book, whose character predates the fear, horror and self-absorption of much of the fiction that perpetuates the darkness of the 20th century. The anonymous protagonist of the novel is more alive than ever, he lives on our streets, among us. Perhaps the truest legacy of Knut Hamsun is that he represented to us through the symbolism of that character or person that we all are or once were.
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