Unholy readings

The Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor poses for a portrait in the city of Puebla, on January 29, 2021. Hector Guerrero

Without mornings in between and with half the commentary in media exile forced by days off, the most politicized readers run the risk of suffering withdrawal syndrome.

Political actors and journalists will stop scandals or leaks to be disclosed in more propitious times and, consequently, social networks will find it difficult to nurture the endless chora of passions, disappointments and belligerents.

In the absence of fuel, I suggest you take a break from politics and its vagaries and explore the possibility of one of these books for a few days.

They will allow you to reconnect with other stories and with human beings who do not live in front of cameras, microphones and social networks, pretending to be better than they are.

It would begin with the latest novel by Fernanda Melchor, the new revelation in its own right of Mexican letters.

The woman from Veracruz has been writing and publishing for some years, but it was not until her fourth book,

(2017) that her success exploded in international literary circles.

It is a novel with many nods to

Juan Rulfo's

, a comparison that would be overwhelming for any author, but from which Melchor comes out very well.

One of those rare cases in which literary criticism and the readership market coincide in applause.

It has been translated into dozens of languages ​​and was a finalist for the prestigious Booker International Prize.

Writers often suffer the hangover of overwhelming success;

there is a long list of anecdotes from authors whose talents were temporarily or permanently inhibited after a universally acclaimed work.

This is not the case with this young woman.

He has just published

(Random House), the story of Polo, a gardener who works in a residential subdivision for families with ostentatious trucks and endless pools, for whom the young man is invisible despite spending twelve hours a day watering pastures between them. and cutting bushes.

Invisible to everyone except an obese and spoiled teenager who begins by offering alcoholic beverages to the gardener and ends up inviting him to commit a crime.

But it is not a

, or not exclusively.

The reality that Melchor paints us of Polo's life, between the hell in which he lives next to his mother and the Paradais in which he works, which is nothing more than another version of hell, is a powerful and almost addictive immersion in dramatic world that we too have stopped seeing.

It is reminiscent of the famous Korean film

, but in a stark and certainly closer version.

An X-ray so exact and precise that it could well have saved Ricardo Anaya all the anthropological journeys he is taking in search of the deep Mexico.

Equally addictive is the novel

, by the Spanish Sara Mesa (edit. Anagrama), about a woman who decides to move to a small town in a remote and rustic region, in which she had never been, to leave behind a rugged past that the reader hardly intuits.

What seems like a chronicle of the difficult path she must follow to stop being a stranger among her distrustful neighbors, ends up becoming a fascinating introspection journey into this woman's soul.

A phrase that would seem inadvertent constitutes the key to the whole novel, and in essence the source from which so many seemingly inexplicable torments arise in the daily lives of all of us: “the discomfort of happiness is an idea that haunts you insistently: a kind of happiness that contains in itself the seed of its own destruction.

In the breaks given him by the controversial activism caused by his sharp criticism of the 4T, Héctor Aguilar Camín allowed himself to publish a morbid amusement under the title

(Random House).

And I say morbid because in its first pages the story seems to be taken directly from the famous case of Sealtiel Alatriste, the writer and university official forced to resign after the accusation of being a repeat plagiarist.

And the parallelism seems evident from the first lines of the novel, recounted in the first person: “One Monday they announced that I had won the Martín Luis Guzmán Prize… on Tuesday they accused me of having plagiarized some newspaper articles… on Thursday of having plagiarized the subject of my winning novel… on Monday of the following week, sixty-nine writers signed a letter against me… the following Wednesday I announced my resignation from the university position… ”So far it would seem notes taken from Sealtiel's Facebook.

But as the page continues, the character, who is definitely not our Sealtiel, reports that for the following Thursday he has been accused of the murder of his wife's lover.

And although this entry conditions the little novel to be enrolled in the detective genre, the blood note is just the pretext to explore the not well understood reasons that lie at the heart of the plagiarist.

Or as the character could well say: there is no more honest and paid tribute to an author who is admired than to plagiarize him with talent.

If the days are not enough for you to open up after these titles, at least I suggest you not to miss a work as unexpected as it is refreshing:

, by Juan José Millás and Juan Luis Arsuaga.

It is about the chronicle made by the first, a prestigious novelist, acting in the role of Neanderthal, of his conversations with the second, a paleontologist and sage, who acts as sapiens.

And indeed, the book is studded with pearls to be treasured, sometimes because they are unexpected and almost always because they force us to recognize that in so many things in life we ​​are still closer to the Neanderthal than to the sapiens, as we are well aware of. Miles.

For example: “I will always love you, it is said, but that of loving is always very easy;

How about promising that I will love you next Tuesday at 4:30 in the afternoon?

That's complicated".

Or that of “the experiment of godless societies is very recent.

We don't know yet what is going to happen ”.

Or finally: “We are not the result of a planning, of a design.

Nature, as Darwin showed, is purposeless.

However, it is capable of creating biological structures with purpose.

Nature does not seek, but finds ”.

The best thing about this ingenious chronicle is not its pearls or its letters for bronze, but the laughter that the Neanderthal in us starts every two pages.

@jorgezepedap

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