- Bouvard and Pecuchet (Gustave Flaubert. DeBolsillo Ed.)
book is the most complex of Flaubert, and which was working longer: in the beginning of his career and spoke of him, and was writing and rewriting until the end of his life, he left unfinished. What you need: two retired Parisian clerks to late forties, bought a farm and engaged in a range of disciplines, so far, they have been completely unrelated: from philosophy to botany, architecture, performance, literature , religion. They fall in love and out of love. Despelean fight and the neighbors, your life does not leave anyone indifferent. Both your attitude and your stubbornness us about human stupidity. Nonconformity of the vacuum. The meaning of life when you feel that you have not lived.
The book is a cruel satire, rather than to think, goes right to the center of emotions and we rebelled against the emptiness of some stocks. The book is famous also for being one of the main influences of In Search of Lost Time, Proust, and Ulysses, Joyce.
- Millennium Carvalho (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, ed. Planeta)
Vázquez Montalbán had always wanted to celebrate the twenty-five years of Pepe Carvalho making it go around the world. This is the book that happens, and, coincidentally (or causally) the will of Pepe Carvalho, a broken man after the last episode of the series, Man of My Life. That Biscuter Carvalho and turn around the world is a stupid gesture. So much so in fact, Vázquez Montalbán decided turn for the occasion, Bouvard and Pecuchet . The gesture is absurd. The attitude is absurd. What you see is absurd. And this absurdity is lived by them from the point of view of a neutral observer, impartial, away from everything. Their presence does not matter. No change. Not learn much. Meanwhile, their relationship is defined, complejifica, turns and up comes a time to invest.
Carvalho, along with Holmes and Marlowe, my favorite private detective. His series is literally the most risky of all. Conan Doyle was a writer by trade, efficient, sober, with a style that grated the serial without falling into it. Marlowe is the writer of the economy, expeditious, fast, direct as a punch. In their literature does not anything left over, and is precisely what is crudely transformed into literature. In high literature. Imagine thrilled with the typewriter (read Houellebecq to learn more about the relationship between the typewriter and literature) writing Goodbye, Baby, while his wife was dying, sublimating his pain, abstracting, and in a very subtle way, making the book in a very tender act of love for her; just read the title. Her best novel, indeed. Vázquez Montalbán's another thing exceptionally gifted writer (as Sergi Pamies, a poet who eventually made prose), a sober economic and overflowing virtuosity controlled it rather baroque as poque intention simply could. His saga has two types of books: literary experiments (like the first book in the series, I Killed Kennedy , attached to what he called the "feeble-minded novels") and crime novels to use, excellent quality, which also radiographed local history from the death of Franco to almost today. Millennium is a decent climax, circumstantial (by the sudden death of the writer), sad, which suspends the series and he ties only with this gesture, in Bouvard and Pecuchet so dear to the writer.
- The Benevolent s (Jonathan Littell, ed. Pharsalia)
; Jonathan Littell is a young writer trained in New York, resident in Barcelona, \u200b\u200bwith French as the language. This is his second novel (I have not yet managed to find the first: when you do the devour). Warning: this book is exceptionally hard. The plot: the chronicle history, a colonel in the SS fled to France, where he lives and thrives in hiding, with total impunity, which has never been sorry for what he has done. Did not fight in front: a bureaucrat living room, a manager who has spent only one thing in the entire conflict: the extermination of people. Ethnic cleansing. Mass murder. Everything worked and described with ease, in a tone that he speaks of his office by a beer after leaving work, supported quietly in a bar.
The protagonist knows that he has a narrow escape. Their feeling is that relief extension, and live like a parasite that is time. Work. Prosper. Married. Has children. Educators. All you slip while submerged in a complete and utter nihilism. Only reacts when he recalls with nostalgia his days of bureaucratic mass murderer. His life person is completely submerged in hypocrisy: homosexual at a time and circumstances that could not be counted, misanthropic, selfish, desperate to limits. The book is a stark reflection, difficult, painful, human existence on the implementation, the meaning of life. His writing style is virtuous, mature, very far from what one would expect from a second book. Is very long: nearly a thousand pages of detailed descriptions, almost scientific. Not enough to explain the crimes, makes you live almost in real time and subjective, and get to know exactly what someone feels about a Luger to the neck of a person kneeling on the ground completely disarmed and pulls the trigger. Shocking. Obscene. And, simultaneously, sublime.
- Earthly Powers (Anthony Burgess, ElAleph Editors)
Perhaps the best novel by this master, known mainly for one of his early novels: A Clockwork Orange , title, incidentally, maltraducido: the original, A Clockwork Orange is more, well, A Clock Orange , filmed in censored version by Stanley Kubrick. Burgess: central writer of the twentieth century and one of the most polyglot of which is known to have English, French, German, Italian, Castilian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and I do not know how many languages. Reached an unvented, including: the cavemen speaking film version of Jean-Jaques Annaud's film Quest for Fire , extraordinary novel by French writer Rosny. Burgess: musician. Artist. Creator exceptional novels. Everything I've read in Excel. Earthly Powers is, perhaps, by permission of The Orange ... my favorite book of all who wrote. It is a novel late on, once again, nearly a thousand pages, written about 1980. The plot: a semi-retired writer, gay activist, billionaire bohemian who lives in exile from his native Britain (character inspired, apparently, in Somerset Vaughan), is prayed to act as witness to a miracle in the process of beatification of the late Pope newly dead. Before they were were friends. Then they drifted apart. The final, unexpected, given in three pages, turn the other nine hundred ninety-seven.
Burgess writes as an artist who does not want to be. Requires the reader laughs at him, gives him to live initiatory journeys that do not lead anywhere, with stimulation, torture, pampering, play with him. Burgess. The wicked old bastard. Burgess. He who did not like the Nobel. Burgess: know it is wanting. And addictive.
- Uncertain Gloria (Joan Sales, ed.Planeta, Carles Pujol English version)
Catalan's great novel about the Civil War. And obviously, one of the key novels about the Civil War in any language. Uncertain Glory is the novelization of one of the central texts of Joan Sales, its Cartes Torres Màrius (never translated into Castilian). The book's prose is beautiful, virtuous, rich in vocabulary, agile, air. The plot unfolds in two different time levels: full War Civil Aragon stayed in front, and the immediate postwar period, where survivors are found and recognized. One of the keys of the book is one of the most powerful literary characters I know: Soleràs, the best friend of the protagonist. Republican, atheist, which has a profound sense of morality that reflects a very personal inner world will change sides when it is clear who will win the war only to lose himself. His deep philosophical reflections, his existentialism, messy vitality, are the engine of the book, over a string of very strong characters, well defined and better explained. Gloria is uncertain, for all this, one of the most important texts ever written in Catalan.
Sales Joan was also Pepe's father, the poet who have known before thanks to Albert Pla made versions of his poems in Cançons d'Amor i Drugs. The relationship between the two could not be easy, but what should comfort the father is how much her son had to Soleràs.
- The Third Reich (Roberto Bolaño, ed. Anagram)
My ignorance of today, my little desire to follow the news or keep up, I played a trick, which later became The greatest literary surprise of my life, time to meet Roberto Bolaño. Circulated through a glass house of their Detectives Salvajes, published, too, Anagram, where, on the back, it read that this was the novel that Borges would have loved to write. Yeah, man, and what else. One day, with the intention of destroying such a ghost, I opened the book thinking that would leave before finishing the first chapter. At four pages took at last breath. I looked away from the book and thought "shit, it's true." Indeed. Boland is one of the central writers in English, at the height of Borges, Cortazar, Benet, of Cela and a few others. Bolaño is certainly one of the central writers of the twentieth century literature. So clear.
The book was written in 1989 and published posthumously to the Sant Jordi past. Those who disagree with him away from his masterpieces ( 2666 for many critics, but the book does not pass, for me, ahead of its Savage Detectives, one of the two or three best I've read in my entire life.) We review here not so much for literary values, inherent in a monster like Bolaño, for what counts. The plot is hypnotic: a German couple traveling to a location on the Catalan coast (Malgrat, perhaps?) For the summer, in late August. She wants to bask in the sun. He also wants some quiet to prepare an article about his hobby up: a war game called The Third Reich, which recreates World War II with a precision and detail minute, a surgeon. The game focuses exclusively on military issues, and ignores completely the Nazi ideology and acts parallel to the proper conduct of the war, which is what most marked, and which marked the final change of paradigm. The hardness of the protagonist is dealing with it all, and his conscience is clean on the ethical dilemmas that may accompany a game where you take command of the armies of Hitler to let them conquer the world. Outside the room are a number of characters (the owner of the hotel staff itself, German and English friends that are doing) that slowly end up confusing the game with what happens outside. Spend more or less dramatic events. Relationships and personalities of the characters change, up to a completely unexpected ending with a brutal ethical implications. The narrator is the protagonist, who is writing at the end of each day, with much discipline, a journal. But there is an omniscient narrator. The present continuous is the time of the story, and just gives you time to reflect on the things that go sucendiendo. Not to think of that may happen in the near future and medium term.
- Cocaine Nights (JG Ballard, ed, Minotauro)
The book is perhaps the best in the final stage of this fascinating writer, and yet little known.
Ballard is a British citizen born in Shanghai, where he lived until the end of World War II, when it was separated from his parents and imprisoned by the Japanese in a field concentration throughout the conflict. His experiences there are well known thanks to his only truly famous book: Empire Sun , made into a film in a way that bright for a Spielberg got one of their best titles, in addition to discovering this monster called Christian Bale. After various trades served until late contact with literature. His first book, The Drowned World (Underwater World) was published past 40 years. The Drowned Word defines what has been his whole career: the plot shows us a lonely doctor who wanders through a world that has become the Triassic in twenty years, looking for his biological unconscious. Their degree of introversion is so beast that is no longer enough to investigate and get to the bottom of your brain: you need to do to the bottom of your DNA. Need to feel dinosaur. Amoeba. His prose is economical and, simultaneously fascinating and hypnotic. It is a different writer
Cocaine Nights is a much more mature, less radical. The writer does not need to go to science fiction to create worlds choking closed oppressors: they simply move to Marbella. The plot elapses in one of those developments that have grown on the outskirts of the city, unique to Britain, where the exception is to find someone who speaks Castilian, a world-transplant, neither here nor there. A world sordid closed. A world of retirees who have hung the sign happily ever after in their homes and their lives. A world of existential boredom. The protagonist realizes that this boredom, this apathy, this boredom, they can fail the entire business. And so, there are a number of individuals who struggle against it. The book, written in the style of Ballard caracerístico deluded, making running down the center of the spiral pattern, is one of the most lucid thoughts that I know about when and how to live pre-crisis.
- inspiration and style (Juan Benet, ed. Alfaguara)
the Bible literally . Juan Benet, a writer, at least to the height of a Cela, bridges and roads engineer by profession, he held open study all his life, voracious reader, lover of literature. Juan Benet, with sufficient distance to his passion to even be fully immersed in it, being able to watch it in perspective. Juan Benet, equipped with an analytical temperament let him know exactly why and how he writes. And being able to explain. To explain, first. And to make it understandable to others.
The book, an essay, literary passions runs (Poe, Conrad, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Cervantes) and explains why they wrote and wrote. First of all is praise of the office and, through it, the style, the two pillars that form the structure that supports a work inspired. Benet draw, too, even tenderness rebut the text that Poe wrote about its beautiful composition The Raven , his best known poem, and offer an alternative explanation as to why it is far more convincing than that of Poe himself.
addition: read the book and enjoy it. When you have Terina or, if you are architects, replace the word "literature" and "architecture" where you will find it there, think of works that you like one of your teachers and you have one of the best books on architecture ever written.
- What we have eaten (Josep Pla, ed. Destino, col. Ancora y Delfin)
Pla is always one of my favorite writers , especially for its hooligan soul hidden behind the facade of nineteenth-century writer maximally wise. It is perhaps the main writer of the last seventy or eighty years in the Catalan language: its vocabulary, its ease of writing, the incredible amount of work, failure to distinguish between genera (as literature is an article in a newspaper as, say, their Parliamentary Chronicles , found in Castilian entitled The Second English Republic, published by Imago World Cambó paid to undermine the Republic, as his novels and travel books or anything other than his poems , which are shocking and, fortunately, has not translated into Castilian), the extreme purification of his prose makes it a different writer. Unique.
Its alpha and omega are two books brothers The Gray Notebook and What We Have Eaten. The Grey Notebook has that wonderful thing of being a cheat book that I like. Theoretically are their diaries when he was little more than twenty years telling her down to Barcelona from Palafrugell cream, and ending with the hiring of a diary (I'm not sure if it was The Publicitat ) that sent a correspondent to Russia ( lessons learned, obviously, in his trip to Russia ). In practice, the book was completely rewritten his seventy years, so no need to get frustrated if you passed this age and are not able to write at a level that dwarfs that have many Nobel laureates.
Regarding What we ate: a little more to comment on its title. It is precisely this: a eulogy of the ingredients, of the ways to do the kitchen of his childhood (much of which was kept at maturity, recovered today by the restaurants at both the area and the rest of Catalonia). Singular opinions, understood, fun, complains of seafood. He says his only virtue is that it is easy to peel. Croaker prefer, he said, the best fish of the Mediterranean. Two of us to believe (for details, restaurant L'Empordà in Figueres ol'Arcada in Palamos, to give good examples.) Talk of the stews. Talk Niu of (Nido) (for the non-empurdanés: the niu gut is a stew of cod, thrush, peixopalo (dried cod) and who knows what else on a fried onion that has a more development twelve hours). Talk of preserved anchovies. Of the rust. Wine. Coffee (and decaf). Not a cookbook. It is not a customary. Book is not exactly nostalgic (especially taking today, Spains, Bullis (although it extends Ruiz-Geli) Can Racons Faves, Lluçanesos, Arcades and many others who do well and not so well known). It is a reminder of a way of life. A claim to our land, some ingredients in a way of life over time, a neighbor relacionrse through the meal, after dinner, the conversations. Finally, one of the most beautiful books of Pla.
- Nocilla Project (Agustín Fernández Mallo)
This review is for a trilogy of three books:
- Dream Nutella (Kandy)
- Experience Nocilla
- Nocilla Lab (two tots d'Alfaguara)
Fernández Mallo has one thing in common with Benet: not a full-time writer. Physicist by training, works in a hospital in Mallorca and in his spare time he writes. It's happening right now: so much so that Fernández Mallo has a highly recommended blog, the man who left the cake.
The Project Nocilla : Borges takes the statement saying that a book must have eighty percent of used and twenty percent of novelty literally and have the trilogy. Is written as a literary collage. References to the movies, blogs, other books, manuals, to lyrics. The theme of the trilogy is the desert. The loneliness. Human experiences. Generically not know too well what is set. Theoretically one levels. Surely, a collage. And for me, poetry. A poem in three volumes, long, dense, different. Fernández Mallo is a writer who controls, especially, the narrative rhythm and makes him what he wants. Phrasing right, yeah. Lexicon is, yes. It has culture, yes. But most of all got rhythm. Takes the reader and immerses him, from the very first moment, as happens when you start to hear a good record with startups that memorable. Then you abandon and simply enjoy. Because of his age (he has less than forty-five years) and what he has done so far, Fernández Mallo is one of the writers who make me dream all I know. It is a gift.
