A story of kidnapping and abuse, the adventures of a clandestine Jew and other books of the week

Family reunion in March 1932 at the Kaulsdorf summer house.

Maria Jalowicz Simon is the girl on the right, in the second row. Personal archive of the Jalowicz Simon family

The diaries of Rafael Chirbes are more than enough material to understand and share the shudder that the author of

generated by the fact of living, an effort that has rarely been seen, within Spanish culture, so painfully exposed.

The first installment of the Diaries of him (Anagrama, 2021) was a revelation.

We knew nothing, in general, of Chirbes's diaristic writing.

The second volume,

, in which we can continue accessing the privacy of a reserved, almost hermetic, nervous, educated and hypersensitive novelist.

The heart of the title of the book by Héctor Abad Faciolince alludes to the diseased organ of the protagonist, Luis Córdoba, who awaits a transplant, but also acts as the seat of feelings, emotions and passions that spread calculatedly throughout the work, leading it towards a powerful vitalist plea in which the beauty of what exists and the ethics of caring for the other prevail over monstrosity and moral abjection.

All this far from preaching or sermons.

, is extremely harsh

.

“During those years, Arancha practiced prostitution for drugs or food […].

The fact that I was there and witnessed everything was not an impediment.

A social services document describes the possibility that my own two- and three-year-old body was sometimes part of the sexual relations or prostitution exchanges carried out in that small room on Calle Descalzos, a situation that he himself Manuel recognized later”, writes the writer, as well as an accredited artist, the son of a young drug-addicted prostitute.

The volume of him is the fruit of a

that he did with his father, Manuel, who kidnapped him as a child and whom he contacted again to get some answers through this artistic intervention.

For his part, the journalist and doctor in engineering Kiko Llaneras has written

to help the reader orient himself in a reality as complex as the world of statistics.

As in a pleasant gymnasium for neurons, the book offers useful reflections not to be cheated by those who try to manipulate the figures in their favor, but also to distrust intuition and recognize the traps that our brain sets for us.

If those who suffer from a certain innumeracy make the effort to overcome their misgivings, they will surely be the ones who will get the most out of their reading.

Other books reviewed by critics of

are

, which brings together the stories Marie Jalowicz Simon told her son into a tragicomic account of a Jewish woman's struggle to survive in hiding in Berlin during Nazi oppression;

the collection of poems

, where Lorenzo Oliván invites you to decipher the secret code of the world;

on them , a reflection by the French writer Joseph Andras to make visible some of the dissidences that challenge the capitalist system through historical prints starring activists and seditious people;

which compiles the interesting chronicles of the Chilean Pedro Lemebel, a multifaceted artist and representative of current

literature , some texts that tried to function as a revulsion to achieve social change;

o

, by Osvaldo Baigorria and Néstor Perlongher, which collects, 30 years after his death, 28 letters that Perlongher, poet and LGTB militant, addressed to his friend Baigorria.

Finally, we also highlight

, by Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), which Turner has just republished.

In his four volumes, the German expert transferred the values ​​of the present to the past to seduce the general public and popularize the discipline.

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