There are other worlds and they are all in this

“I'm not a moron.

You are the morons, "says the actress who stars in

the first story in the storybook by Argentine Nicolás Teté, which is inserted with Photoshop in

photographs

awards ceremonies and promotional material to relaunch her career.

"The phone rang again as before, when she starred in the youth series of the moment, when she was the most famous orphan on television," she says.

It does not matter that they discover her: for a few hours her false life is true.

At the latest since the expansion of the virtual realm, however, some of the "true" life has become false, while the "false" life became more and more "true" thanks to social networks and forums. , to comments on web pages, the dissemination and consumption of hoaxes and the popularization of technologies that make image falsification and

. It is not necessary to remember that the story of Teté (San Luis, Argentina, 1989) is inspired by the true story of Anna Allen, the Spanish actress who pretended to have been at the Oscars in 2015. The characters in her book are prematurely unsuccessful child actors , girls trying to get Woody Allen's attention at a party to get a role in his new movie, young people who destroy trash cans at night and become internet freaks, fan club presidents who disband.

Everyone yearns for fame — even scorn, if you put it on someone's mind — and sometimes they get it only to find that what they needed was something else. And in that they differ from those of the Argentine Mariana Sández (Buenos Aires, 1973), for whom fame is not a problem. A teenager who has to share the holidays with his father's new girlfriend, a young actress who knows that she will only get secondary roles ("filler, stepmother, girlfriend") and wants a child; a divorced man who is still in love with his wife and smokes too much; a couple of dwarfs who teach them that not all happy families are the same: 'So that there is not so much sky', the first story of

, already presents the kind of characters and situations (urban, realistic, contemporary) that will characterize the entire book. A certain humor and the orality of stories that, like those of Teté, are almost invariably narrated in the first person are the strengths of its author, whose literature for the proverbial common reader works only if he or she identifies with the characters.

The realism of these stories (sometimes rarefied and grotesque, but never very distant from “reality”), to which those of

could be added

, the debut of environmental activist and restorer José Fliman (Santiago de Chile, 1950), has its necessary reverse in the reality posited by

, the new book by the Bolivian Giovanna Rivero (Montero, 1972);

, by the Mexican Antonio Vásquez (Tucson, United States, 1988);

, by the Colombian Viviana Troya (Pasto, 1992), and

, by the Argentine Agustina Bazterrica (Buenos Aires, 1974), who continue the repertoire of forms of the most traditional Latin American fantasy story and its themes: squalor, violence, disease, uprooting, the body.

There is an emphasis on the cinematographic and on the visual and descriptive resource, which characterize the state of the story in Spanish

Rivero and Vásquez place their stories in the type of rural setting in which Christian religiosity and a paganism that refuses to disappear give the characters the certainty that the extraordinary events they experience have or can make sense. Bazterrica, for its part, resorts to concealing the causes even from the eyes of the characters themselves, who often access them in a “surprise” ending that is not always achieved, and also incorporates humor and a greater repertoire of narrative forms. Troy meets in

very short stories, open, that share the fact that their characters all live, like the famous consul, under the volcano, in houses where "the air does not reach" and they tremble, with walls covered by cracks and roofs covered with ash . Everything in his book is fragile: the syntax, the unity of the story, its ascription to one genre or another, and that fragility is its main strength.

Vásquez seems to know very well the tradition in which he is inscribed. And Rivero is one of the best authors of the very extensive and very irregular "new Latin American gothic realism" of recent years. That their stories speak of the weight of an incomprehensible religiosity, of violence against women and children, and of the corruption and forced disappearance that are so recurrent in Latin America, and that in them there are few temporal references, makes it seem to pass in a time out of time, but also, given their relative lack of novelty, that the reader gets the impression that they could have been written in 1970 or the last year. In the best

by Vásquez;

de Rivero) reveals the possibility of an "other" reality, situated on one side of what we call, by convention, "the" reality. But there is not much in them that makes us think that separating what is real from what is not is more complex now than it was 50 years ago. And perhaps the current fantasy literature should address this problem, since for some time it seems evident that there are other worlds, yes, but that they are all in this one.

Naturally, it would be magnificent if realism did too: in it, as in the fantastic, not all authors manage to expand the repertoire of possibilities with characters other than the usual ones, new approaches and different tones. There is much

in these stories that, often with a simply functional language, cinematographic in its emphasis on visual appeal and description, seem to characterize the state of the contemporary short story in Spanish and the exhaustion of some of its formulas. But there are also very good stories in the books belonging to this trend

, by Sández;

, by Teté;

, by Troya;

, from Bazterrica;

Fliman's

and

), and the reader will enjoy them without further ado if they manage not to ask themselves certain questions about how reality and its multiple reversals are being narrated at this moment.

Readings

'Fresh earth from his grave'

Giovanna Rivero.

Candaya, 2021.

176 pages. 15.20 euros.

'Some normal families'

Mariana Sández.

Unlimited Shipping Company, 2021.

130 pages. 8.25 euros.

'Nothing can happen to us'

Nicolás Teté

Blatt & Ríos, 2021.

100 pages. 6.99 euros (e-book).

'Tephra'

Viviana Troya.

Laguna, 2021.

92 pages. 5.99 euros (e-book).

'Distant signals'

Antonio Vásquez.

Almadia, 2021.

129 pages. 17.99 euros.

'Nineteen claws and a dark bird'

Agustina Bazterrica.

Alfaguara, 2020.

192 pages. 7.99 euros (e-book).

'Spa'

José Fliman.

Cuneta, 2020.

89 pages.

12.30 euros.

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