Perhaps no summer so r Aybradburyan as this one of its centenary. Not only because of the atmosphere of a fantastic story wrapped up in the everyday - one would only need to imagine the Montag firefighters, the Martians, the traveling carnival or the morbid passers-by from the chilling tale The Crowd with Masks - but because it is a vacation back to the close, to enjoy those things that escaped us with the great trips, the parties, the social commitments. It's a summer like El vino del estío (1957), Ray Bradbury's beautiful novel about his childhood and which is the most lyrical work of a writer who was an avid reader of poetry all his life (Frost among his great influences) and he allowed himself to be soaked as few by her in his narrative.
As in that melancholic story, starring an alter ego , Douglas Spaulding, (his middle name and that of his father), 12 years old, a hypersensitive Tom Sawyer, it's time to make dandelion wine, drink lemonade on the porch and put on shoes. new sneakers to feel the sensation of being released on the grass of an unrepeatable summer, aware of the ephemeral nature of our steps and our existence, the fear and wonder of being alive. That's pure Bradbury.
Also his own childhood and the fictional town of Green Town (Illinois), which reproduced the original Waukegan of the writer, his Arcadia of sarsaparilla of the Midwest, are the bases of another of the great Bradbury novels that nobody should stop reading, La Fair of Darkness (1962), with more fantastic elements - that carousel that allows you to go back in time, the sinister fairies under the invocation of the Macbeth witches (the original title is a line from the tragedy, Something wicked this way comes ) - but the same extreme sensitivity when explaining feelings, be they love, terrors or longing for human beings. In that novel, one of the most beautiful father-son relationships in literature appears.
Deep down, it is the same poignant and terrible stories that Bradbury always tells, whether they take place in the arcadian past, the future or another planet. It is the personal universe that he coined from his astonished childhood in adventure and horror films, in comics, in pulp literature , then in the classics Poe, HG Wells, Verne, in the long hours of the public library. He said that one day, when he was little, a fair-minded man, Mr. Electric, had touched him and told him: “Live forever”, dedicating him to wonder. He would have liked to be a magician and he never stopped having that umbilical cord with his child self, which is one of the great features of any good writer.
He wrote a score of novels and half a thousand stories (including the seminal of the butterfly theory, A thunderous sound, with its dinosaur hunters, taken to the cinema and now reissued by Nórdica), with such celebrated collections as The Illustrated Man . And also a book about his unusual relationship with John Huston when he wrote for the filmmaker, in a display of literary virtuosity, the script for Moby Dick.
Fahrenheit 451 is his great science fiction novel - and his creation best made into a movie by Truffaut, although every time you see the 1983 adaptation of The Fair in the Dark, starring Jason Robards, you like it more - and the only one in the world. A genre that he wrote, as he said himself, that called everything else fantasy or horror (see his chilling tales of October Country, which have so influenced Stephen King).
In any case, they are the Martian Chronicles (1950), which are still completely alive and move reading after reading, the pinnacle of his work. There are the rockets, the sad, tremendous and evanescent Martians, the USA of its childhood conquering Mars as if adding a new star to the flag, the melancholy mixed with strangeness that makes a lump in your throat - just like Patrick O ' Brian felt sorry for those who were afraid of the sea, Bradbury felt sorry for those "reluctant to cry" - failed loves, loss, hopeless death and hope.
Conservative, believer, visionary of the future without a driver's license, Bradbury nevertheless felt comfortable in Los Angeles, after all, Hollywood was the Mecca of his childhood dreams (he had his own star on the Walk of Fame), and he worked hard for the then new medium of television, where he often materialized his fantasies. His modernity had limits and although he very politely thanked the irreverent tribute in the form of a song and music video Fuck me Ray Bradbury , which he dedicated for his 90 years Rachel Bloom, there is no doubt that some verses such as “Kiss me, you illustrated man / I'll feed you grapes and dandelion wine / And we'll read a little Fahrenheit 69 ”, they must have surprised him.
He would have liked to be the first terrestrial buried on Mars, to have his ashes sent to the red planet in a Campbell's soup can. For now, he rests in a grave with his longtime wife, Maggie, in a Los Angeles cemetery. But let's not rule out that one day they may move it to the terrain of Mars baptized with its name, the 2012 landing site of the Curiosity rover. It would be justice, and a precious climax to his eternal Martian Chronicles.