These are the 10 books you can't miss in 2021. Arbitrary recommendations for 2021, as the end of writing arrives.
Robert Diaz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
Read the first part.
Perhaps, one day literature will disappear and it will do so when communication through words is no longer necessary, when there are machines that can transmit thought.
It seems incredible, but since the 19th century, and thanks to the case of Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860) - who was pierced by an iron bar that went through his cheek, came out of his forehead and miraculously survived - neuroscience acquired the dimensions in which it is today because, by studying that case, it became clear that parts of the brain could be analyzed in order to find the specific places where sensations such as love, religion, God, fears, happiness, etc. are stored.
The BRAIN initiative of 2013 set out to map the brains of human beings. Neuron by neuron. An unprecedented effort that could result in knowing if something hurts a person mentally, find it physically and change it through drugs or therapies.
From this perspective, the aim has been to relate people's thoughts and decode them so that they can be translated into mechanical movements. Since the year 2000, there have been results in this area that have given serious hope for the feasibility of a machine being able to transmit what we think. If we can send what we think, will it be necessary to speak? The answer is an unknown that the future of science will elucidate. In the meantime, in that uncertain future for literature and speech itself, these are arbitrary recommendations for reading in 2021, as the end of writing arrives:
6. The great friendby Elena Ferrante. DeBolsillo.
Elena Ferrante has raised a whole search around her. They don't know for sure who she is. It has been presumed that it is in fact her husband Domenecio Starnone who writes her novels - an obviously sexist view - but Claudio Catti's research has revealed that she is the freelance translator Anita Raja, the daughter of a German mother who escaped the Holocaust and a Neapolitan judge.
Another element that led us to suspect her is that Raja works for Edizioni, the publishing house in charge of publishing Ferrante in her native Italy and that, after the worldwide success of this novel, the translator's income increased tenfold. In reality, we don't really care who this celebrated writer is, what is really worthwhile is her prose, the depth of the situations in which her characters, mainly two women, and the way in which their friendship develops in an Italy that suffered greatly in the post-war period.
The vicissitudes that they go through since their childhood and that, as the tetralogy progresses, increase the level of demand on the reader, who goes from easy situations to more complex circumstances.
7. The friendby Singrid Nunez. Anagrama.
The friend by Nunez, is a work that unfolds after the death of a teacher, who is also a friend and possible lover of the writer, who achieves a novel without the greatest of setbacks.
The novel works as an essay on literature itself, but it also works as a very personal story in which the characters do not need a great presence, but rely on the discourse of its narrator who goes into the context of her life in a little more than brilliant way and launches different links where she catches the passage of the dogs in literature and the function of the writers or characters of them. All these relationships, apparently irrelevant, take on a different and, in many cases, decisive connotation to give a new contour to that inner voice that continues to grow until it encompasses the whole story.
Ingrid Nunez was once the mother-in-law of the late Susan Sontang and this is relevant because of some similarities that exist between the two, especially the essayistic, lucid and concrete tone of her narratives.
8. Lincoln in the Bardoby George Sunders. Seix Barrial
Master of short stories, George Sunders surprised both friends and strangers with this novel that is a historical journey through the life of one of the most important men in the history of the United States: Abraham Lincoln, where he looks at a decisive moment in the course of his life: the death of his young son.
The novel is a journey through this moment where a series of choruses appear and lead the scene through multitudes of dark and light places where spirits interact with the characters.
The paragraphs are brief, concise and beautiful in their economy, but not because of what they describe - which are very deep areas of reflections on life, death, friendship, honour and, indeed, the meaning of decisions made or not made - but because of the economy of their words which, with little, say a great deal. A story full of rich experimentation without it feeling like an element of ignorance, Sanders shows us that great literature can also be a short score.
9. Sapiens: From Animals to Godsby Yuval Noah Harari. Debate.
One of the sins that the Hebrew philosopher Yuval Noah Harari commits in this book is, perhaps, to believe that mankind will get rid of all its evils by the same force in which the market has delivered its evils during its history; However, the deployment of knowledge that he makes about the historical facts and the way in which he uses them to prove his hypothesis, makes his account of the history of humanity a historical line that, homogeneously, has served to notice how human intelligence has been imposing itself and, uninterruptedly, has overcome the obstacles that disparity and selfishness have imposed on it.
For Yuval, all conflagrations have been due to humanity's lack of integration, its lack of collaboration and its primitive state in which even nations look out for their own interests and interpose their sovereignties to the idea that, inexorably, will come where the world will be one big village.
10. Ragtimeby E. L. Doctorrow. Grijalvo.
Ragtime is, shall we say, the father of Jazz or at least a rhythm that precedes it, this novel is set in the early 20th century and is, in another way, a Forrest Gump style novel where a character, in this case an entire family, intersects with the history of the United States and the intersection of characters like escapist Harry Haudini, revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, banker P. J. Morgan or feminist and social fighter Emma Goldman.
They interact with various characters who are otherwise an archetype that the writer deploys to serve as a backdrop against which the story and the narrative itself move at a dizzying pace.
Within its pages, the turn of the century in the United States is seen as a series of events that take on relevance and congruence thanks to the mastery with which Doctorrow makes the fictional and the non-fictional amalgamate. Doctorrow is one of the most gifted writers in the United States who, nevertheless, have not achieved fame. In keeping with the enormous quality he demonstrates, he may be largely forgotten, but not one to lose his vigor with the passage of time.
Epilogue
Perhaps, one day literature will disappear, as will painting and all the other fine arts, replaced by robots and, however technology threatens, art will still be there.
Even if it is a machine or a program that initiates a stroke or composes a song, the human element will still be present in some form.
At the beginning of the last century, it was thought that, with the invention of the cinematograph, other arts would perish and it was not so; instead, there was an enrichment where all the fine arts could be enriched. Technology is not a fatal destiny where everything homogeneous will be lost; it is, instead, an opportunity to experiment with what is new, with what does not exist and always offers us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves.
