Inspired by the echoes of the Covid pandemic
and
quarantines, the writer
Margaret Atwood
- the author of "The Handmaid's Tale", which has become a feminist emblem - and the editor
Douglas Preston
promoted the writing of the collaborative novel
"Fourteen Days"
, in which
36 writers
participate with their stories , including the judicial bestseller
John Grisham.
Together, the authors of this work - not yet translated into Spanish - give free rein to
stories of love and black humor, between pain and death.
The story follows the inhabitants of the Fernsby Arms, a building in Manhattan, who begin to
gather on the roof
in the first days of the pandemic, to kill the time that seems to pass slowly due to the alteration of daily routines since the pandemic. advance of the virus.
Following the example of
Boccaccio's "Decameron"
, where a group of fugitives flees from the
Black Death
, in the 14th century, the stories in this work go through situations of separation and death, as well as fun and entertainment to endure the threat and anguish.
John Grisham.
Bestseller with his police.
Photo: The New York Times
Although the structure of the "Decameron" inspired this work, the situation that arises is different.
Boccaccio's narrators had escaped to the countryside;
Here, the directors are trapped in a city from which the
rich and privileged have
quickly fled and in whose streets and avenues the growing noise of humanity has been replaced by the
wail of sirens
that usher the sick and dying to hospitals. that fill up, notes the prologue of this Authors Guild Foundation novel, according to
The Guardian
.
To create the work, Atwood and Preston called on 36 writers, including
John Grisham, Meg Wolitzer, Dave Eggers and Celeste Ng
, although the compilers themselves also participated.
At the end of the book, a list will show who wrote each part of the work.
The cacerolazos seem one hundred percent Argentine to us.
But they don't have
copyright
.
In fact, at the beginning of this work, edited by Chatto & Windus, residents gather on the roof of the tower to participate in the
nightly ritual of banging pots and pans to show their support for emergency services
and health professionals. .
Then they bring chairs and even snacks and one of them, a
gay man devastated
by loneliness, sets up a kind of
informal lounge
.
The price of admission to that room is a story that is surreptitiously recorded on his phone and then transcribed into his big book.
"Fourteen days" joins the series of novels about the pandemic that in 2022 began to set a publishing trend.
The relentless sadness and precariousness of the first months of 2020 runs through the stories.
Thus the person in charge of the building, a young woman exasperatingly unable to establish contact with her father's nursing home,
daily monitors the dizzying increase in Covid cases and deaths
in New York, writing them down on the leftover blank pages of the accounting record.
Also in his notes are details of the building's inhabitants, their nicknames, a guide to their stories, weaknesses and grudges.
Ghost
narratives
compete with tales of lost love, black humor with sentimentality;
and each of the neighbors' stories reveals something about themselves.
In this way, the book becomes a kind of
puzzle
, reminiscent of the novel about apartment life,
"Life Instructions", by Georges Perec
, although in a somewhat less experimental vein.
With information from Télam
J.S.