A BOOK: The Long Wait for the Angel , by Melania G. Mazzucco
From Pietro Aretino to Thomas Bernhard through Henry James, Virginia Woolf or Sartre, the figure of Tintoretto (1518-1594) has always been a mine for writers. From that mine in 2008 the Italian Melania G. Mazzucco took a huge gold nugget in the form of a novel. The long wait of the angel , who narrates in first person the last 15 days of the painter's life in a plague-ridden Venice, is a prodigy of emotion, construction and erudition. It is a 16th century history book and a painting treatise that talks about geometry and pigments as well as the prices of each canvas. It is also a guide that today - the city has not changed - serves to trace Jacopo Robusti's work in the Serenissima through the many churches from which he received commissions, from the Madonna dell'Ortoa San Giorgio Maggiore. Without forgetting, of course, its Sistine Chapel: the overwhelming Scuola Grande di San Rocco.
The long wait for the angel is all that plus the rivalry of its angry protagonist with the powerful Titian. But above all it is fiction in the best sense of the word (which has it). Mazzucco manages to wrap the reader in such a way that he ends up suffering for the fate of the other great figure in the story: Marietta, the genius' illegitimate daughter, a painter like him and dead at 22 years old. What seemed like another historical novel on the back cover turns from the first page into a tear caused - and self-inflicted - by a beast of nature that despises the rest of his family as he despises the world. Only Marietta is saved. And saves it. Perhaps when it is too late. For both. Without a gram of sentimentality or Manichaeism, wisely dosing the ton of documentation that he managed to write this work, Melania G. Mazzucco, who in each book changes register, gives a masterful lesson: of humanity and literature. Javier Rodríguez Marcos
The long wait for the angel . Melania G. Mazzucco. Translation by Xavier González Rovira. Anagrama, 2011. Available in All your books, Amazon and Fnac.
A DISC: Channel Orange by Frank Ocean
This album starts with the sound of a door opening. An email that falls into the inbox ... The piece is called Start . Lasts 45 seconds. We are in 2012 and here is a brave man who proposes that the discs are units, that the order of the songs makes sense, that you have to listen to it mostly completely and in one go (it only lasts 45 minutes, wood; well, this is a bit more: 55). Frank Ocean (born Christopher Edwin Breaux in 1987 in California) was 24 years old when he recorded this monumental Channel Orange, chronicle of the sound deconstruction and story of a troubled young man with sensitivity to the surface. What Ocean did was twist musical genres of yesterday, today and what was to come (pop, hip hop , commercial black music, soul , trap ...) to return them in a brilliant, sophisticated and accessible packaging for everyone. This last important fact: few modern heroes manage to escape the tendency to exploit the rare. This is the album that Lenny Kravitz has been trying to make for a lifetime, songs that Marvin Gaye would sign, texts that reflect on sexual identity and existential discouragement, avant-garde music for all audiences.
Without being a job where the collaborations are taken off, those who appear here leave their touch in a subtle, but interesting way: Pharrell Williams, André 3000 (Outkast) or the guitarist -oh, surprise- John Mayer. It is an album that transmits relaxation, perfect for these days of turbulence and troubles. Special mention to the Pyramids song, the longest of the lot. They are almost ten minutes of contained dance, a song strategically placed in the final stretch of the album, a piece that now that a virus has us all locked up makes us travel to a beach, in the late afternoon, with a cocktail in hand. For dreaming that it won't stay. Carlos Marcos
Channel Orange . Frank Ocean. Def Jam, 2012. The album can be heard on Spotify and other platforms.
A FILM: 10,000 km , by Carlos Marques-Marcet
In 2014 Carlos Marques-Marcet began to investigate the world of couples, and started that exploration of sentimental communication with 10,000 km , starring a couple who for work reasons made the decision to physically separate. While Sergi stays in Barcelona, Alex moves to Los Angeles. They are nine hours apart, a world both in kilometers and in hours. Not even technological support, the possibility of seeing each other face to face manages to bridge a crack that the film enjoys deepening for dramatic reasons. Winner of the Malaga festival (something that Marques-Marcet has become accustomed to over time), and the Goya for its director for best new director, Marques-Marcet introduced the world to two fascinating and very different actors: Natalia Tena, who He builds from the physical outburst, and David Verdaguer, capable of creating from the nuance to various examples of masculinity today, and who with the director has followed this line in Tierra firme and Los Días que Vemn . In 10,000 km , Marques-Marcet will eventually lead the viewer to a conclusion: romantic love, which literature and music have sung for centuries, does not change much with new technology. Another thing is the drives, but the sentimental communication ends up spreading on identical fragile threads from the beginning of the infatuation. And that there is not much screen to solidify it. A hug to that 20% of couples who, from the humor of Twitter, ensures that they will divorce at the end of the quarantine. Gregorio Belinchón
10,000 km . Carlos Marques-Marcet. 2014. The film is available on Filmin and iTunes.
ONE SERIES: Unorthodox
Esther Shapiro can't take it anymore and runs away. At that cathartic moment begins the series that tells his story, that of a young woman from a Satmar family (a stream of Hasidic Judaism) who lives in the New York district of Williamsburg. For this escape from her particular prison, she will use the option of claiming the German nationality that she had from her maternal grandmother and that had already been taken advantage of by her mother, who escaped long before she headed to Berlin. Unorthodox is the story of a liberation. Esty breaks her chains not without pain and without danger, because her husband and a relative leave behind their trail. The plot shows both the first steps of the protagonist (formidably played by Shira Haas) and the suffocating life she led in New York, where her recent marriage had reduced her to a mere container for procreation.
Little of this is fiction. The miniseries is based on the book in which Deborah Feldman, born in 1986, told her own story of reinvention after rejecting her Hasidic roots. Anna Winger, creator of the Cold War-based espionage series Deutschland 83 , saw the potential of that identity-seeking and liberation story, and alongside Alexa Karolinski developed one of the best Netflix proposals in recent months. Because, despite the painful history and drama of that young woman subjected to rules that she does not understand or accept (and that it seems impossible that no one can understand and accept), a ray of optimism looms from the outset in a contrast that Esty summarizes in one of the sentences of the series, pronounced with regret: "God expected too much of me". Natalia Marcos
Unorthodox . Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski. Netflix. 2020. The four chapters of his only season can be seen on Netflix.
A COMIC: Bare Feet by Keiji Nakazawa
There are many accounts of Hiroshima's horror, but few like Keiji Nakazawa's Hadashi no Gen. Born from an autobiographical short story, the publisher felt that the memory of the nuclear explosion disaster was so powerful that it deserved much more. Thus was born a manga that constitutes one of the most heartbreaking expressions of the horror of war. Known in the West as the Gen of Hiroshima or Barefoot , Nakazawa's work tells the story of the Nakaoka family and little Gen, opposed to a war that they do not understand and do not admit, leading to rejection, exclusion and misery . A dramatic reality that will be incomparable to what the little gene will live from August 6, 1945. Barefoot is a scary account of the disasters of war, of the dreadful consequences of the nuclear attack. Nakazawa spared no details: his portrait of reality is rigorous, taken first hand, from his own experience, from memories etched by radiation in his memory. A horror that was only the announcement of what came next: hunger, disease, the desolation of a completely destroyed city, cancer as an inseparable companion of a short journey with an inescapable end.
As the work progresses, Gen's anti-war cry is a denunciation of the abandonment and manipulation suffered by the survivors: forgotten by the American occupation forces, more concerned with documenting the effects of the bomb, forgotten by the leaders, and politicians from their country, concerned with hiding their role in the war. Gen's story constitutes not only one of the most important works in the history of comics, but the most contingent and devastating denunciation of the horror of war. Álvaro Pons
Bare feet Keiji Nakazawa. Reservoir Books, 2016. Its four volumes are available in electronic format on the publisher's website.
A VIDEO GAME : Sekiro, Shadows Die Twice
We have talked here about Dark Souls (2011), Hidetaka Miyazaki's revolutionary medieval-style game, famous for its setting and for its lack of mercy with the player. The last work of the Japanese genius, released last year (in 2015 he would release the equally recommended Bloodborne , whose references were not medieval but Lovecraftian ), is another masterpiece: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice , a game that this time drank from Japanese folklore ( demons, samurai, shōguns ) to plot on that basis the same type of game: extreme difficulty, an absolutely brilliant architecture, fights that leave you with your heart in your mouth. The peculiarity of Sekiro was that, in the combat style of the previous games, he added one more physical dimension: the vertical one; the player, in the skin of a homeless ronin, was now able to jump and hang from the heights, giving the already great level design a depth and freedom never before seen in Miyazaki's work. Jorge Morla
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice . Hidetaka Miyazaki. FromSoftware, 2019. The game is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows.