Following África de las Heras, first a communist heroine in the Spanish Civil War and then an agent of Stalinism responsible for establishing the spy network in Latin America, My KGB nanny (lumens), from Laura Ramosdeals with the Cold War in our region. Who starts as A red Mata Hari with a partner thirsty for sex and pomegranates will end up as a seamstressRental aunt and generous sphinx in a Montevideo is no longer the Switzerland of America, but a nest of spies. He does this with similar emotional closeness and distrust of everyone and with his omniscient detector of human details.
It is a unique children’s universe friendly communism and exile is what reading is all about, with its codes and passwords, in its Montevideo distinction of some of the neighborhoods where the author and her brother lived for seven years and were usually left in the care of the Spanish spy. Along with the biography of África de las Heras there is a record of the biographer’s investigationswho, as she passes through, retraces the Cold War in search of the true remnants of a life that is all the more fictional and elusive for being a spy, due to the twists and turns of fraud and deception as a profession. How is fiction constructed “in person”? he asks.
Underneath the splendor of this story, which takes place between lightning bolts, denunciations and unexpected deaths – with three wild sheepdogs who may have been trained by them KGB– are particularly inspired by those who tell of this false sociability and the methodical “self-liberation” of the Spanish woman in this dissident club, which was “family” for her for almost 20 years. Perhaps Africa’s passion was detachment, the knowledge of how to make oneself necessary and then move on to one’s “prestige”, the act of disappearing.
At the other end of literary genres, by an author belonging to the same generation, paranoia (Interzone). With a fictional autofiction novel, Daniel Guebel he does it again. It embodies three voices plagued by dubious obsessions in a Rollercoaster ride of existential abyssesfalls from the top of the ego, in short, hysteria and silence. The novel is read breathlessly, with the desire to live the experiences without leaving the couch. Yes, pure The evil woman The adventure took us through different scenarios, paranoia It offers an extensive mental geography with the vertigo of a prose of perfect, shall we say, incomparable syntax, into which the most mundane oral records creep in and the specialty of the house, common sense and material reality are presented as an event that always shines.
Finally a book about the present of the Second, Orbital (anagram), from English Samantha Harvey. Winner of the Booker Prize 2024It is a meditative novel – and a contemplative journey through time and space – without plot about the daily lives of a crew in a capsule orbiting the Earth, a small cosmopolitan society engaged in tasks such as meteorology. On this “realistically scientific” spaceflight, we will follow these eight astronauts as they fly nowhere but around the world in a day of 16 sunsets and hurricanes. Zero gravity literature and complete introspectiontells how we are and what we look like when we are not at home, on earth.
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