A BOOK: The unknown dimension , by Nona Fernández
The best demonstration that literature is written with words and not with good intentions is The Unknown Dimension , honored in 2017 with the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz award, from the FIL of Guadalajara for the best novel of the year written by a woman. In the case of the Chilean Nona Fernández, the award and the reason fall short because her book is one of the greats of recent literature in Spanish. The power of his writing is such that at times it seems that neither Truman Capote, John Le Carré and Emmanuel Carrère, six hands, could have written something like that. Why? Because none was a girl during a military dictatorship. Based on a real case, The Unknown Dimension begins in the middle of the Pinochet regime, the day in 1984 when Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, a member of the Army's secret service, went to the editorial office of a magazine to confess his profession: torturer.
What follows is a mixture of spy stories and reflection from the present on the memory of infamous years. It is impossible to read the story of Quila Leo - a prisoner with an indestructible mind capable of imagining stories touching the wood grain of the closet in which he is locked up - without looking up in horror from the book. And it is impossible not to ask the questions that the author poses, rhetorically, to her protagonist, who still lives secretly in France: “Why write about yourself? Why revive a story that started more than 40 years ago? Why again talk about corvos, electric grills and rats? Why talk about the disappearance of people again? Why talk about a man who participated in all this and at one point decided that he could no longer do it? How do you decide that you can no longer do it? What would I have done? Javier Rodríguez Marcos
The unknown dimension. Nona Fernández. Literatura Random House, 2017. Available in electronic and printed edition in All your books, Amazon and Fnac.
A DISC: The Player , by Willie Colón
Trombonist since the age of 15, Willie Colón was the sonic agitator of El Barrio (Hispanic Harlem) par excellence. A New Yorker of Puerto Rican origin, he worked as a dangerous musician (it is not clear where the nickname El Malo came from) who sowed the seeds of hard salsa through the streets of the Big Apple. Colon gave a new dimension to the style, moving in a transatlantic cultural territory formed by Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States: that "third space" formulated by Homi Bhaba, theorist of postcolonialism. Colon, in his greatest glory years (still active, watch out), entangled Latin and African folklore with funk vibes, jazz outbursts and acid rock. He even explored what we could consider symphonic salsa. His discoverer surname comes to his hair.
The Willie album in question is a double CD entitled The Player , released in 2007. It is a compilation of pieces by the musician that accurately depict his professional and vital career. Here we find from the first single that he recorded with his own band ( Fuego en El Barrio ) to 'Never ends', a whole declaration of principles recorded in 1989. And in between, some of the great songs that the genuine voice put Héctor Lavoe ( El malo; Che-Che Colé, based on a tune from Ghana ; La Murga; Calle luna, calle sol; Juanito alimaña ) , pieces by Siembra, one of the albums he billed with Rubén Blades (the one that gave him the title and Pedro Navaja ), two records with Celia Cruz that brought out the best of the queen of salsa ( Zambúllete and Un bembe pa 'Yemayá )… Add to that a joyful roster of luxury singers and instrumentalists: Ismael Miranda, Nicky Marrero, Yomo Toro, Barry Rogers, Milton Cardona ... "No, no, no, the sauce never ends." Javier Losilla
The Player . Willie Colon. V2, 2007. The album is available on Spotify and other platforms.
A FILM: The skin I live in , by Pedro Almodóvar
Many of Pedro Almodóvar's films speak directly about communication. Or from lack of communication. He is also a very verbose filmmaker in showing screens, large or small, in his works. The union of these two themes is part of the heart of The Skin I Live In (2011), because this is how Dr. Robert Ledgard and his patient, the desperate Vera Cruz - great cinematographic reference - relate through screens. - to which he undergoes six years of all kinds of operations to make him look like his deceased wife. In order not to reveal much more of the plot –because the character of Vera Cruz, embodied in a violently correct way in her looks and gestures by Elena Anaya, is a box of surprises–, we will say that all the characters hide tremendous secrets from their past. Starting with its protagonist, built like a chisel in his soul and in his physique by Antonio Banderas, who resumed his collaboration with Almodóvar here after a 21-year hiatus.
But the most interesting part of The Skin I Live In , an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet's novel Tarantula , is Almodóvar's use of screens as communication and construction of terror, thereby connecting with modern and stylized Japanese terror. Fear is no longer inflicted on physical closeness, but technology can transmit it vicariously. Finally, to make a good double show, after seeing The Skin I Live In , the audience should enjoy Georges Franju's The Eyes Without a Face , the mother of Almodóvar's film, another approach to pure terror that an enigmatic mask can provoke. Gregorio Belinchón
The skin I inhabit . Pedro Almodovar. 2011. The film is available on Filmin, iTunes and Netflix.
A SERIES: The visitor
Author and screenwriter Richard Price, co-creator of the highly recommended The Night Of and screenwriter of the contemporary classic The Wire, is responsible for the television adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Visitor . The story begins with the murder of a child in one of those small towns where almost everyone knows each other and also almost all have a lot to hide. The first investigations point to the coach of the children's team as the main suspect in the crime, which in itself is terrifying. However, things get complicated when other evidence shows that the man was somewhere else, miles away, at the same time.
Stephen King has not had much luck adapting his stories to the small screen (or the big screen). But in this case the result is a very appreciable miniseries that takes its time to unravel a plot that, in its 10 episodes, simmers and manages to create very well the disturbing atmosphere appropriate to the story, in which a Supernatural strength gradually takes center stage. Evil seeks to sneak through any gap and expand, as detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) and private investigator Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo) will discover. The person responsible for setting the style of the series with the direction of the first two episodes is Actor Jason Bateman, whose good work behind the scenes has already been recognized in past Emmys with the Best Director Award for the thriller Ozark . The result is a disturbing story to take calmly and let yourself be led by evil. Natalia Marcos
The visitor. Richard Price. HBO, 2020. The ten episodes of the first season can be seen on HBO Spain.
A COMIC: Frank Miller's Daredevil Born Again
The importance of Frank Miller in American comics is undoubted and fundamental: it represents a decisive turning point in the evolution of mainstream comics, establishing the definitive consolidation of a conscious authorial vision in the genre of superheroes. Author comic had already been implanted in American comics during the 1970s, but its passage to the dominant genre was shy and isolated. However, Miller's work at Daredevil from 1979 to 1983 brought about a fundamental paradigm shift: dynamiting the Stan Lee method of industrial production to finally trust an author (with the sole collaboration of Klaus Janson inking), who knew how to modernize his speech bringing together cultural and artistic influences traditionally alien to comics. After leaving the series, Miller returned in 1986 to make what would be one of the comic book's masterpieces: Daredevil: Born Again . With David Mazzucchelli on pencils, Miller focused on developing a script that involved the deepest thought ever made about the superhero. It takes it from the superheroic tradition born with Siegel and Shuster and continued by Stan Lee, that of "all power carries a great responsibility", to connect it to a much more complex one: that of heroic fiction that Joseph Campbell theorized.
For Daredevil to be a modern hero, he had to walk his own "hero's path." It must sink, lose everything and be reborn. A death and rebirth that also equates it to Christian religious discourse, generating a reflective parallel discourse on religion, mythology and fictions. The man without fear is finally: without hope, without ties to the past, fears disappear and the hero can finally be. A difficult task that neither Miller and Mazzucchelli prevent from launching a very harsh denunciation of the neoliberal drift of politics and American society in the 1980s. An indisputable masterpiece. Álvaro Pons
Daredevil Born Again . Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli. Marvel / Panini, 1986. The comic can be obtained in digital format on the Panini Comics website.
A VIDEO GAME: What Remains of Edith Finch
Sometimes from these pages we give the impression of saying that if a video game is content with being narrative in some way it limits its own possibilities. That is true, but only in part, because the video game world is in full eclectic effervescence and there are works that, with an eminently narrative vocation, do a great job. One of the best examples would be What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), a game that is part of the walking simulator genre (which means that the player can move around an environment and little else), in which, in the first person We toured a family home, reliving the deaths that all the members of the protagonist's family have had for several generations. In other words, the game only "tells you" something. But in what way. What remains of Edith Finch drinks from the sources of magical realism to create a special story, attentive to detail, full of intelligence and with a domain of the change of register (from humor to love, going through terror) simply prodigious. Jorge Morla
What Remains of Edith Finch . Annapurna Interactive, 2017. The game is available for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows.
