Fictions for an unlikely autumn: the most outstanding books of the 'rentrée'

This 2020 will go down in the history of the publishing industry as the year with two September and no book fair. The state of alarm decreed on March 14 to stop the coronavirus forced the closing of bookstores and postponing the spring festivities, including April 23. Its staggered reopening in May marked the first rentrée. The second comes in the midst of the outbreak of the pandemic, something that has already forced the crowded Madrid fair to be definitively suspended - rescheduled for October 2 - and to rethink the format of two mastodons such as those in Frankfurt and Guadalajara (Mexico). The uncertain autumn that is coming will have at least one certainty: it will be full of weighty books. Among other reasons, because publishers tried to hedge their best bets in March in the hope that around summer they would help square the accounts of the most unlikely year of our lives.

1. A wonderful novel

Elena Medel was born 35 years ago, but she was only 17 when she published her first collection of poems and revealed herself as the great voice of Spanish poetry of the 21st century. It had been known for a long time that she was working on a novel that never finished appearing. Well, it's here - well, October 2 - and it's another jolt. It is entitled Las maravillas (Anagram) and tells the story of two women of different generations who arrived from Córdoba to Madrid. Condemned - not resigned - to work on what comes out, the two have led a life in which two questions throb: what would their relationship with love, motherhood and family have been like if they had had money? What if they had been men? Without Manichaeism and in just 200 pages that do not give truce, Medel places his protagonists against the background of Franco's death, the victory of the PSOE in 1982, the economic crisis or March 8, 2018. If we were professors, we would say that substance and form go hand in hand in a stylistic prodigy that, while remaining highly personal, recalls the audacity of Virginia Woolf, the atmosphere of Carmen Laforet and the rawness of Rafael Chirbes. If we were journalists, we would say that one of the best poets in Spain has suddenly become one of its greatest novelists.

2. Feather fields, battlefields

Another author who cannot write a bad book is Sara Mesa, who in Un amor (Anagrama) raises another of her sieges of "normality". The story of Natalia, a translator who decides to settle in a town, allows her to reflect this time on "the discomfort of happiness" while exposing all the conventions about sex and feelings. The protagonist of La Buena Suerte (Alfaguara), the first novel by Rosa Montero after receiving the National Literature Prize in 2017, also stars in a flight to the countryside . Pablo is a successful architect who one day gets off the train at a station that does not correspond to him and decides to start a new life confined in a southern town. Empty Spain begins to fill with books. Ignacio Martínez de Pisón - End of the season - and Alberto Olmos - Irene and the air - also deal with another type of love, the paternofilial , both in Seix Barral. The latter, by the way, still has on the news table a collection of articles whose title refers to the past but could become a premonition: When the VIP was the best bookstore in the city (Círculo de Tiza).

On the thanatic reverse of the Spanish narrative of the next few months is one of the novels called to alleviate the crisis in bookstores: Line of fire (Alfaguara), by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, which narrates from the point of view of eight characters the bloodiest episode of the Civil War: the battle of the Ebro. Sales are assured: Sidi was ranked number 12 in 2019 in the list of most bought titles according to the survey of the Federation of the Guild of Publishers (number 1 was still occupied by Fernando Aramburu with Patria , a 2016 premiere). The controversy is also assured: with the Falcó and The Civil War series told to young people behind his back, Reverte claims to have written his novel regardless of any ideological position, an endeavor as difficult as crossing the Ebro in the summer of 1938.

3. The (fallen) angel of the revolution

Irving Castillo is one of the protagonists of another choral novel, Como dust en el viento (Tusquets), by Leonardo Padura. Homosexual exiled in Madrid, he sometimes sits in the Retiro to look at the statue of the Fallen Angel - a few steps from where the Book Fair will not be held - to wonder if the monument will not be a symbol of everything he believed in and his friends in the times of "happy credulity", when what they did was "historical" because it involved the forging of the "new man" hardened in work, study and the rifle. The monumental (672 pages) novel by Padura deals with the reverse of that dream, a multiple portrait of a generation between the so-called Special Period and the “historic” visit to Havana by Barack Obama. This took place in 2016. That one, after the fall of the USSR in the 1990s, another time of a “new normal” full of euphemisms, ruin and rafters.

Without leaving Cuba and now that blackness and slavery are back in the conversation, the reissue of Biografía de un cimarrón (Siruela), a classic by Miguel Barnet that tells the life of Esteban Montejo with the tools of the best literature , is especially timely testimonial. Another relevant recovery is very first in Spain. Finally, a publisher from the Peninsula —Días Contados— dares to publish El río sin orillas , by Juan José Saer, a classic of Argentine literature. Saer did with the Río de la Plata the same as Claudio Magris with the Danube to tell the story of his country, mixing story, memory and travel.

Among the most anticipated Latin American novelties of the new course are, however, the storybook Las voladoras (Foam Pages), by the Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda, who set the bar very high with her masterful Mandíbula (Candaya); Paradais (Random House Literature), by Mexican Fernanda Melchor, who did the same with Hurricane Season (on the same label), and La hija sola (Anagrama), by her compatriot Guadalupe Nettel.

4. Old reality, new normal

It is difficult for the same author to win awards like the Booker or the Pulitzer twice, but this is what Hilary Mantel and Colson Whitehead have done. The first now publishes Thunder in the Kingdom (Destiny), the volume that closes his successful trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. The second returns with Los Niños de la Nickel (Random House Literature), the story of a black boy interned in a reformatory despite his idealism and pacifism. There are many ways to put the knee to a person's neck and not all are part of the police repertoire.

If part of the translated narrative keeps one foot in the crudest reality - this is also the case of The War of the Poor (Tusquets), by Éric Vuillard, or The Consent (Lumen), by Vanessa Springora -, another tries to flee from her by way of science fiction and dystopia. They are the paths chosen by Ted Chiang and Don DeLillo. Famous for writing the story that inspired Denis Villeneuve's film Arrival , Chiang publishes Exhalation (Sixth Floor), a collection of stories starring androids, alchemists, digital pets, and humans with absolute memory. DeLillo, for his part, doesn't need to travel very far - to 2022 - because the immediate future is already unsettling. That year there is a global power blackout that leaves humanity without access to technology. Can you imagine a confinement in those circumstances? He tells it in El silencio (Seix Barral).

5. The south is an idea

Joan Manuel Serrat has always been the most Latin American of the Poble Sec singers. So much so that in Regreso a Ítaca , Laurent Cantet's film from Havana based on a story by Leonardo Padura, his songs are discussed with a vehemence only reserved for baseball and politics. In 1985, the author of Mediterráneo returned affection from the other shore by publishing El sur also existe , an album based on poems by Mario Benedetti. On September 14, the Uruguayan poet's centenary is celebrated, and four days before Alfaguara publishes an anthology of his poetic work prepared by Serrat himself, who in the prologue claims to have tried to represent all possible Benedettis: “The routine office worker, the middle-class Montevidean, the committed journalist, the curious traveler, the militant of the homeland, the exile and the unemployed, and also the partial intellectual, the political fighter and, of course, the meticulous and hard-working poet who never stopped be". On the same day, the same publisher reissued the definitive version of Un myth discreet , the biography that Hortensia Campanella published while the poet was alive.

His compatriot Idea Vilariño belonged to the same generation as Benedetti. They were both born in 1920, both died in 2009, they both wrote great love poems. She has taken much longer to be recognized, but her complete Poetry is available in Lumen and Literature Random House launches Ya no sera , a pocket anthology that owes its title to one of her most famous poems, which says: “Ya no sera, / we will no longer live together, I will not raise your child / I will not sew your clothes, I will not have you at night / I will not kiss you when I leave, you will never know who I was / why others loved me. / I will not get to know why or how, never / or if it was really what you said it was, / or who you were, or what I was for you / or what it would have been like to live together, / to love us, to wait for us, to be. / I am no more than me forever and you / You will no longer be more than you. / You are no longer in a future day / I will not know where you live, with whom / or if you remember. / You will never hug me like that night, never. / I will not touch you again. I will not see you die ”.

That poetry survives the most prosaic is shown by the fact that Benedetti published a book entitled Poems of the office based on his years of experience in the now mythical Will L. Smith, SA. Spare parts for automobiles. That politics survives also has proof: in 15 days he will be on the street Confía en la gracia (Tusquets), by Olvido García Valdés, who, with good judgment, parked all his own editorial activity during the 15 hectic months he was in charge of the General Directorate of the Book. His new collection of poems will also coincide with his entry into the Cátedra Hispanic Letters collection, which in another time served as an unofficial school canon. It was when literature weighed on the curriculum and the coronavirus was not the most hated classmate.