The beginning of the Spanish literary autumn has three settings: the bookstores, the vaccination centers and the Retiro park.
The earliest books already reign in the former and the younger readers parade through the latter while the rest make lists for the Madrid fair, which begins on September 10 with limitations that will determine one of its key ceremonies: analog signatures (and its digital variant, selfies with novelists).
The bookstores will have to select well the authors they have, just as the publishers have done with the books they launch.
The commitment to established names is one of the symptoms that the coronavirus crisis generates risks that should be minimized.
The paradox is that these names do not come to serve us kind stories, but stories crossed by the less luminous side of society and politics.
Sometimes literally.
1. Politics in prose
After signing a film that deserved better luck (
On this side of the world
) and a wonderful autobiographical story that I hope will continue (
Earning a living
), David Trueba launches
Dear Children
(Anagrama), a novel narrated by a brilliant, cynical political advisor and reader of Azaña. From province to province, the caravan of the presidential candidate Amelia Tomás crosses the country accompanied by an "intimate team" that serves Trueba to display a hilarious generational range while reflecting, without hot cloths, on the media (a simulacrum of reality) and democracy (which only has "a weak point": it depends on the people, that is, on the children of the title). With brilliant dialogues but without underlining to show off, the comedy soured until it made sense of one of the consultant's early reflections, so appropriate for times of neonormality: “The problem with people is that they only know how to guide themselves by their own experience. Most have renounced any other mental construction that does not go through what they have experienced,for what I have already experienced. That is why the best democracies emerge after wars, after disasters, after excesses. When the pain is still fresh, the memory of the damage. As time goes by, they forget the trauma and rush back to the fire ”.
Belén Gopegui, in September 2017 in Madrid Carlos Rosillo
2. Poetics and politics
The personal is political, but fictions tend to be more concerned with the former.
In fact, in recent Spanish narrative there are few examples of those beings with ties and arguments that, beyond our possibilities, monopolize newspapers and television news.
Along with Miguel Delibes (
The disputed vote of Mr. Cayo
), Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (
Assassination in the Central Committee
), Antonio J. Rodríguez (
Candidate
) or Julio Fajardo Herrero (
Ordinary Assembly
), one of the few who have appeared at the device policy is Belén Gopegui (
Unauthorized access
).
Gopegui happens to be an openly political novelist and she is;
also openly poetic.
This second dimension, very present in his prose, is even more evident in
Existirían el mar
(Random House Literature), the choral biography of a group of not-so-young people who share more than a flat.
The novel is counterpoint by verses like these: "I don't want to feel with you / what I want / with you / is to leave a trace / in the ice that covers the rocks and green / for the path / of the following ones."
3. In the polis
Antonio Muñoz Molina is one of the writers who have devoted the most effort to reflecting narratively —that is, walking — on the relationship between urbanism and urbanity, citizenship and democracy or, as we have already said, the personal and the political. All this runs through the pages of
Volver a qué
(Seix Barral), a mixture of a diary of confinement, a family memory and a portrait of a citizen who grows tomatoes on the balcony while imagining life for his neighbors. Muñoz Molina's career as a pure storyteller has overshadowed a line of his work that —from
Ardor guerrero
to
A solitary walk among the people
, passing through
Como la sombra que se va
- has been expanding the limits of autobiographical writing for years. To that door of the self, by the way, Carlos Marzal also calls this fall with
We were never happier
(Tusquets), a story of childhood and soccer passion.
If the action of
Return to where
moves between the past, O'Donnell street and Retiro park,
Los vencejos
(Tusquets) takes place a few hundred meters further northeast, in the Guindalera neighborhood of Madrid.
That is the territory of Toni, a man who sets a date for his death and, meanwhile, dedicates himself to recounting his life and that of a network of family, friends, acquaintances and greetings.
Returning to the structure of short scenes that gave him such a good result in
Homeland
, Fernando Aramburu manages to demonstrate that sales success also comes alive.
Something to which Manuel Vilas has also been applied with
Los besos
(Planeta), his first work of fiction after
Ordesa
and its planetary sequel,
Joy
.
Eighties writers Liliana Colanzi, Carlos Fonseca, Jennifer Thorndike and Paulina Flores, at the Guadalajara International Book Fair.Ulises Ruiz Basurto / EL PAÍS
4. Transatlantic policy
It is often said that Latin American literature has more prestige in Spain than readers. That is why it is appreciated that the autumn in which Colombia stars in the Madrid Book Fair brings the new books by Fernando Vallejo (
Escombros
, Alfaguara), Ida Vitale (
Time without keys
, Tusquets), the César Aira essayist and Formentor prize (
La ola que lee
, Random House Literature) and another autobiographical chapter by Raúl Zurita (
On the night the sky and at the end the sea
, LRH). Or, for not leaving Chile, the highly anticipated first novel by Paulina Flores (
Isla Decepción
, Seix Barral) or the Spanish rescue of
Space Invaders
(Minuscule), the book by Nona Fernández that points out all the good things about her masterpiece (
The Twilight Zone
) and, brand of the house, returns to the Pinochet coup to reflect on the relationship between the memories we keep from the past and dreams with whom we imagine the future.
And even more to be appreciated is that some independent labels bet on new names with not very accommodating books.
This is the case of Virginia Cosin (
Passage to the act
, Malpaso) or Marina Closs (
Three thunders
, Transit).
5. Author policy
In Spain many copies of few titles are sold - Arturo Pérez-Reverte already warms up (boat) engines with
The Italian
(Alfaguara) - and a lot is translated, almost what is not written. Foreign literature is also loaded with heavyweights, starting with the American king of the nineteenth-century European novel of ambition: Jonathan Franzen. On October 21, the more than 600 pages of
Encrucijadas
will be in bookstores
(Salamandra), the first installment of a trilogy about the family, its great theme. A marriage in dissolution and their four children stage a crossing of destinies and characters that Becky sums up like this in a letter to one of her brothers: “They chose, you chose, I chose. At least one of us is happy with their choice. " The happy is she. And the editor of Franzen, of course, which is also the editor of Margaret Atwood, who publishes
MaddAddam
, closing the dystopian trilogy of the author of
The
Handmaid's
Tale
. Series, and not just television, are a safe bet when the first title hooks the public. This is the case of Ali Smith and his cycle on the seasons, which closes with
Verano
(Nordica). Smith is also the author of the enthusiastic foreword to
The voices
- "witty, delicate and cheerful" -, the title with which Blackie Books continues its Muriel Spark Library (the impatient can complete it with the titles of the Scottish writer published so far by
Impedimenta
).
Another delicate but not cheerful Scotsman is Douglas Stuart, who won the Booker last year
for his Shuggie Bain Story
(Sixth Floor), starring a boy determined that his mother does not sink and the world does not sink him.
And on the side of the net somersault: a Paul Auster of 1,000 pages but without fiction:
The immortal flame by Stephen Crane
(Seix Barral).
The poet Francisco Brines celebrates the awarding of the 2020 Cervantes Prize at his family home in Oliva (Valencia ).Mònica Torres, EL PAÍS / EL PAÍS
6. And goodbye
The narrator of
Qué es tu tormento
(Anagrama), by Sigrid Nunez,
also insists - this time on accompanying a terminally ill friend -
who already gave a master lesson on how to tell the duel in
El amigo
. "The meaning of life is that it stops," says Nunez, taking up a phrase from Kafka. Francisco Brines would also sign it. The last Cervantes award died in May, leaving unpublished the book he had been working on for a quarter of a century. It is called
Where Death Dies
and the Valencian poet was slow to consider it closed because, he said, he had the feeling that finishing it would be his own end. Next month it will be published by Tusquets, the same stamp on which his poetry collected so far can be read. Its title says it all:
Rehearsal of a farewell
.
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