What a great pleasure, so pointy and so round, it is to read, and even more to reread, but never not read, Alejandro Zambra. This book, Do not read (Anagrama, 2018; there were previous editions, in Diego Portales and in Alpha Decay), prolongs from within, as if it were his combat diary, his way of crossing out, like the Surrealists or the Beatles, everything that It was cheesy or exaggerated. In the prologue, he declares that poets or storytellers often quarreled with him, due to the criticism he partially gathers here. But when you read the book, you can see, as if a razor were to open the brains of the angry, that in those cases where the anger was caused by those who breathed through the wound, they deserved, at least, eternal silence. But there they continue, Zambra did not kill them, he only wrote about them, he revealed them.
I met Zambra because of a plane, the one that came from Santander to Madrid in the early summer of 2006; He has just come out to Bonsai street , a brilliant novel that lasts what a trip of that distance. I was brought, from the tail of the plane to the midlands, the politician and good reader who is Ana Pastor, now vice president of the Spanish Congress. He came fast because he felt that it was urgent that, among the inhabitants of the air, at least I read that work of art. When I descended in Madrid I was so happy to have read Bonsai that I dedicated myself, as if I were its editor, who had been Jorge Herralde ever since, to letting it be known to the four winds, including the wind of Spanish cinema. This one did not walk right-handed and it was a Chilean, Cristián Jiménez, who later threw it on celluloid. That experience of bearing his name in the titles of a film, undoubtedly joyful for Zambra, is one of the best parts of this Do Not Read, which is indeed a book that criticizes even unread books , or that the author swore in his day never to read.
Not reading is an autobiography of Alejandro Zambra while reading as if he undressed. Sometimes he plays with these metaphors, because reading is also dressing up with books, or undressing of books. Among the occurrences that he claims to have had, for example, he slides his (I suppose a certain) initiative to make Chile, his homeland (whose history is, for him, "a sad novel"), "the first Long Novel Festival, it did not come to fruition but it seems to me a good idea. " A long novel, points out Zambra, is the best thing that can happen when the flu comes, whose confinement puts at your disposal, for example, time to advance in a long or slow novel ... "Therefore," he recalls, "there are traces of salsa tomato in my copy of The Magic Mountain ”.
All these texts were published in Chilean newspapers; the editor of many of them was Andrés Braithwaite, who fought with Zambra so that it was not excessive or gross, as Zambra suggests that he himself could become. They encompass, soft or devastating, a long list of authors from their own country; but no text, none, renounces cosmopolitan excursions that go from Jorge Luis Borges to Heinrich Böll, from which he collects a wonderful story, that of the man who collects silences recorded absent-mindedly by radio technicians. If I now summarize any of those texts, it is more, if I tell you what it says about the good or the bad, about those who have been read and about those who never read, you will miss an exploration that made me so full-fledged that in some At that moment I felt that if I got a fever I would be happy to have read that Zambra that had already made me happy by returning by plane, another confinement, from Santander to Madrid one afternoon of which I already have a memory.
