'Origami': 200 aphorisms for a Kamasutra of language

Portrait of the author Guillermo Busutil.

Courtesy of the publishing house Fórcola Ediciones.

Books embrace, open up, flutter (like birds, butterflies, dragonflies), pollinate, correct myopia of thought, offer themselves as boards for shipwrecked people or as lanterns for fugitives, walk through scars, make love, transform into cats or vampires they jump rope.

Books are silkworms or interior stairs, they risk their lives for an adjective, they cause states of alarm.

And reading inaugurates our relationship with the outside (the place where words breathe, are sewn up, put at the service of what is clean, stop counting for more than necessary, coo) and with two kinds of ghosts: those of the past and those of the past. of language.

Throughout almost 200 aphorisms, the writer and journalist Guillermo Busutil (National Prize for Cultural Journalism and narrator) gets us to look at books and experience reading as organic acts, as another way of being the body.

Books and reading should not be the refuge of banality (“misuse frays words”), but that of ethics, politics, pedagogy (“teaching to read without stepping on words in their shadow”), well-understood madness (“reading knocks down windmills”), spirituality (that “silence” that runs through various texts to build from it another relationship with the invisible and the unspeakable), writers (dozens of tributes to deceased contemporaries, among these to Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Rafael Pérez Estrada, whose spirit hovers over the entire book),

It is a series of texts (philosophical pills, micro-stories, greguerías, one-line poems, mini-sociologies, trail of ants) that excite

The book, the reading: life intensified, and the vindication of what humanizes the human in the midst of so many other instances that dehumanize it.

A series of texts (philosophical pills, micro-stories, greguerías, one-line poems, mini-sociologies, ant trail) that move people because of how accurate their diagnosis is, how well the author expresses himself, and the furious and sweet way that they have to situate us in the heart of meaning.

A sleepless book (the neologism belongs to the author) and happy.

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