Rober Diaz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
Lists are only useful to those who want to check that there is an up and a down, a left and a right; in real terms, lists are necessary to give a location to the readers, to establish differences and parallels between dissimilar things is not a modern invention, but all these generalizations - sooner or later - end up trivializing the object being analyzed because, outside the numbers that the lists leave, there remains the trail of impressions that varies according to the compiler where they are hidden.
Social networks, on the other hand, have given a new boost to everything that can be counted because it's easier to go to the list than someone suggests to look for yourself, although this would mean -ironically- going to other lists.
It is not uncommon for lists to flood the networks talking about the worst and the best, always segmenting and, at the same time, giving us a characteristic of our era: our generation is mediated by the numbersThe statistics and the short results.
The following list is anomalous and to say the least, arbitrary and he doesn't even talk about the 2021 booksIt's a list. with a few minor details and with opinions that only pay tribute to creating suspicions about the authors mentioned here.
1. The luminous novelby Mario Levrero. Random House.
I had not had the opportunity to read this novel in spite of its great fame and being considered one of the best of the 21st century.
It was published in 2005One year after the writer died and five years after he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship -perhaps the only international recognition he received during his life- with which he made this Romance in which develops a diary where not much happensbut it's really all happening.
Levrero talks about his intimacy from a denaturalized sincerity that makes the reader believe that all the abnormality that constitutes his day-to-day life is, to say the least, normal.
You don't see that world where writers reflect moments full of great reflections and insightful diatribes. Here there's a man full of fears and insecurities who, in the good manner of a bard, is surviving little by little in a life that leaves him no great experiences nor great teachings, but which, on the other hand, is giving him entry into a world full of mystery and further experience almost dark and unnoticed from where Levrero manages to draw light.
The everyday talks about the most beautiful arts of the human being who not only lives, but, within the experience, intuits, discovers, within the simplest, the most beautiful.
2. Hurricane seasonby Fernanda Melchior. Random House.
A literary event.
If some years ago Alvaro Enrigue's prose dazzled by his novel Sudden death and a few years earlier Xavier Velasco did it with his Guardian Devil, Melchior starts all over again.
The plot it's about a witch who may well be a transvestite - and who may not even be a witch - who is killed in the middle of a country that's falling apart.
The rawness of his story reminds us of the worst moments that Osvaldo Lamborginni achieves in his Tadeyswithout leaving out Daniel Sada, a teacher that Melchior neither rejects nor emulates, only puts him in the inkwell by remembering him, although with much appreciation, he owes him nothing; and that is Fernanda's literature is a renewal in Mexican literature because it may sound like various influences, and yet, when it is finished, it is known that what is narrated there - together with the way it is done - did not exist before.
It shows, as Borges once warned, that there are only two or three stories, the important thing is to say it differently. Fernanda Melchor has a unique form, her own voice, and she has raised an ampoule because she has not needed the big publicity apparatuses and, above all, from a nest of friends who had to pat him on the back and review him in their own way to succeed.
3. Our part at nightby Mariana Enriquez. Anagram.
The influence of this novel is already being felt in the corridors of the new generations of Latin American writers. Nothing more, nothing less, we are facing the rebirth of Terror literature -if it ever existed- from a perspective that we had not dimensioned before.
If Fernanda Melchor had shown the way where the new writers would parade, Enríquez achieves a novel that revolves around abnormal events.
A father and his son cross the Argentina of the dictator Videla. He's dying. and is guided by the visions he and his son have of spirits that come to them; a gift he has inherited from his offspring. He looks for a place to order it and the search places them in front of characters with the more than strange vicissitudes, loaded with mystery where secret societies and reinvented myths commune to advance something that we could no longer call Magic Realism but in another sense fantastic terror.
Enríquez has been talking about the myths of his Argentina, as well as explaining in relation to what and which mythologies it is that all these provincial narratives have fed their permanence in people's imaginary. Enríquez often gives interviews in pantheons, he has a disturbing personality. With this book he won the Herralde prize as best novel of 2019.
4. Empty housesby Brenda Navarro. Sixth Floor.
This novel has a sum of various pains and also floods the story it tells with its own uneasiness.
What do you stick to? The pain, and that's why, can be overwhelming and even intolerablebut, if you lost a child, how could you pass it on? It is precisely in this area, the expression of pain, suffocation and darkness, that he does not rest and, therefore, is revealing.
It does not shed its desire to exaggerate sensations nor does it give the reader any rest. The pain experienced inside that novel is equivalent to a kick in the shin. I insist that se requires nerves of steel to cope with the loss the character suffers because, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky would say: "The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the mourning, the closer God is..
Surely what Navarro lost was that God that Fyodor was talking about.
5. Exhalationby Ted Chiang. Sixth floor.
Science Fiction has gone straight into a trunk where viewers they only look for it when they see the plots being made like moviesyet this place, many times, first comes the literature.
Ted Chiang is a computer engineer who, with only two books, has turned upside down the community that enjoys these kinds of stories, so acclaimed in the cinema, so despised in literature.
At ExhalationTed is not telling stories in future dystopias, but he is telling stories in future understands and examinesThe possibilities where our imagination could be stranded, in the spirit of a storyteller. He does not sentence and dictate, he constructs stories that lead the spectator to think and not biasedly but within the scope of the narrative that is the best place to convince without complicating the plots until they become impossible.
Chiang, was selected and discovered by filmmaker Dennis de Beneville to bring the story entitled The History of Your Life to the big screen with the name "Arrival" and soon became the most influential science fiction film of the decade according to list experts.
