Robert Diaz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
Lists are only useful to those who want to prove that there is an up and a down, a left and a right; in real terms, lists are necessary to give readers a location, 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 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 boom to everything that can be counted because it is easier to go to the list that someone suggests than to investigate by oneself, 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 mediatized 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 despite its great fame and being considered one of the best of the 21st century.
It was published in 2005a 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 lifetime- with which he wrote this Romance in which develops a diary where not much happensbut it's really all happening.
Levrero speaks about his intimacy from a denaturalized sincerity that makes the reader believe that all the abnormality that constitutes his daily life is, to put it contradictorily, 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 way of a fardero, is surviving little by little in a life that does not leave him great experiences nor great teachings, but that, on the other hand, gives him access to a world full of mystery and further experience almost dark and unnoticed from where Levrero manages to draw light.
The everyday speaks about the most beautiful arts of the human being who not only limits himself to live, but who, within the experience, intuits, discovers, within the simplest, the most beautiful.
2. Hurricane seasonby Fernanda Melchior. Random House.
A literary event.
If a few years ago the prose of Alvaro Enrigue dazzled with 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 maybe she wasn't even a witch? who is killed in the middle of a country that is 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 master that Melchor neither rejects nor emulates, he only puts him in the inkwell remembering him, although with much appreciation, he owes him nothing; and it is that Fernanda's literature is a renewal in Mexican literature. because it can sound like several influences and, nevertheless, when you finish it, you know that what is narrated there -along with the way of doing it- 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 a storm because she has not needed the big publicity devices and, above all, she has not needed the big publicity devices and, above all, she has not needed the big publicity devices and, above all, she has not needed the big publicity devices, from a nest of friends who have had to pat him on the back and give him reviews in their own way in order to succeed..
3. Our part at nightby Mariana Enríquez. Anagrama.
The influence of this novel is already being felt in the corridors of the new generations of Latin American writers. No more, no less, we are facing the rebirth of Terror literature ?if it ever existed? from a point of view that we had not previously considered.
If Fernanda Melchor had shown signs of the path along which 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 is dying and he is guided by the visions that he and his son have. of spirits that come out to them; a gift that he has inherited to his offspring. He looks for a place where to order it and the search places them in front of characters with more than strange vicissitudes, loaded with mystery where secret societies and reinvented myths commune to advance on 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 nourished their permanence in the imaginary of the people. Enriquez often gives interviews in graveyards, he has an unsettling personality. With this book he won the Herralde prize for best novel of 2019.
4. Empty housesby Brenda Navarro. Sixth Floor.
This novel has a sum of several pains and also floods the story it tells with its own uneasiness.
What are you attached to? To pain and, because of that, can be overwhelming and even intolerablebut, if you were to lose 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 face the loss that 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 was lost to Navarro was that God of whom Fyodor spoke.
5. Exhalationby Ted Chiang. Sixth floor.
Science Fiction has gone straight into a trunk where viewers can see it in the only look for it when they see the plots realized as movies.yet this place, many times, first comes the literature.
Ted Chiang is a computer engineer who with only two books has turned the community that enjoys this kind of stories, so acclaimed in cinema, so despised in literature, upside down.
At ExhalationTed doesn't tell stories in dystopian futures, but rather, he tells a story of the same name that gives the book its title. understands and examinesWith the spirit of a storyteller, the possibilities where our imagination could be stranded. He doesn't sentence and dictate, he builds stories that lead the viewer to think, not in a brainy way, but within the realm of narrative, which is the best place to convince without complicating the plots to the point of making them 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 of "Arrival" and soon became the most influential Sci-Fi film of the decade according to the list experts.
