In her famous essay Mishima ou la vision du vide Marguerite Yourcenar compares the Japanese novelist with a Samurai who opposes in his mind two seminal ideas: the sinister ease of dying against the heroic struggle of living. The intrinsic sense of a dichotomy that has been present in Japan throughout its history and is…
Operation Shylock: A Confession
It is not uncommon for a writer to refer to the other person inside that does the job, a double who sits still at the desk, and is capable of producing what later will be called a work of fiction. It is not rare to read confessions about that certain other that is capable of…
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
A farm owned by Larry Cook, the patriarch of a family that for generations has cultivated the land and can proudly claim that its one thousand acres make it one of the biggest in Zebulon County, a farmer’s community in Iowa, where “acreage and financing were facts as basic as name and gender”, is at…
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
When a book opens with a list of characters similar to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and we quickly browse through its seven hundred pages, we can easily get its scope and what it wishes to achieve. And as we begin reading, a dead man’s opening lines in the Prologue are somehow prophetic to what we…
White Noise by Don DeLillo
For Don DeLillo writing is a concentrated form of thinking. The son of Italian immigrants, he grew up in the Bronx. White Noise is his eighth novel, published in 1985 for which he earned the National Book Award for Fiction. The work represents a major turning point in his career. Thanks to it, he became…
Michel Houellebecq o el romanticismo escondido
La Serotonina es una hormona ligada a la autoestima, al reconocimiento de un grupo en la sociedad, nos dice Michel Houellebecq al inicio de su más reciente novela, en voz de su narrador Florent-Claude Labrouste, ingeniero agrónomo que a sus 46 años, deprimido y con tendencias suicidas, toma cada mañana un comprimido de Captorix, antidepresivo…
The Only Story by Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes’ thirteenth novel is a reflection on love as seen by its narrator, who at the end of his life is absolutely sure that we all have only one story to tell. There are parallels between The Only Story and his earlier novel The Sense of an Ending: both are love stories, and both…
Recuperar la memoria mutilada: Rabos de Lagartija de Juan Marsé
En España, el franquismo se encargó con virulenta vehemencia de adulterar la historia y Juan Marsé (1933) se ha hecho a la tarea de revisarla, corregirla y sobre todo recuperarla con su narrativa. En ese sentido, su novela Rabos de Lagartija, aparecida en el año 2000, pretende con justicia, aportar una versión de la historia…
Of memory as salvation: Anthony Marra
Every serious reader keeps track of how books pile up before and after being read. To the left, a never-ending mountain of those waiting to be discovered, to the right those already finished. Some even have lists of suggestions, books reviewed in journals, newspapers, blogs; and it is quite common to feel frustration as the…
Batallas internas: Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Cuando se lee en otros idiomas y se hace de manera cíclica y continua, como es mi caso, regresar a la lengua materna, tras un recorrido literario de más de tres meses, es como volver al regazo de la madre que nos recibe y consuela con las palabras justas. Por qué jamás otra lengua remplazará…
The Sea of Fertility / El Mar de la Fertilidad 