A masterpiece about racial injustice, old age in all its harshness, the reference biography of Kierkegaard and other books of the week

Our book of the week is

, by Margaret Laurence, written in 1964 by the Canadian author, but which is very current due to the problem of caring for the elderly.

The protagonist is Hagar Shipley, who has not known how to take care of her, nor, in the last part of her life, let herself be taken care of.

In addition to the pain and anger of not recognizing oneself in a decadent body, this wonderful novel describes many other feelings: “Dependency, compassion, contempt for the people who care for us, responsibility, generosity and selfishness, emotional blackmail, vampirism, guilt, search for one's own space, self-defense behaviors, desire for liberation, fear of loneliness, vindication of one's own space, discomfort for needing help and simultaneous demand for help... The catalog of emotions is applicable to both the object and the subject of care," writes Marta Sanz in his review.

In the narrative section, the titles

also stand out , in which Camila Sosa Villada domesticates the crude writing used in her great success,

, to narrate the process of gentrification of its protagonist, a married transvestite, with a life well-off and already freed from social oppression, suffering from a process of family neglect despite attempts to transgress roles with an open marriage;

, by John Edgar Wideman, a terrible story in which the author turns to his own childhood in a world of racism and segregation to tell the famous true case of a 14-year-old boy murdered in 1955 by white men that they were acquitted;

or the latest novel by Sergio Ramírez,

, in which its author “draws an old Europe that staggers in the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and travels through it until he takes us to his sentimental Nicaragua,” as Berna González Harbor explains in her review. .

In another interesting article, Jordi Gracia talks about the process of adaptation to exile of several writers while reviewing two recent titles

, which collects the letters sent by María Zambrano and José Ferrater Mora, and

, the biography of the writer written by Coradino Vega.

Other books reviewed by our experts this week include

, the biography of the Danish philosopher written by theologian Joakim Garff;

, by Jesús A. Martínez, an interesting essay on the importance of printed paper in the clandestine fight against Francoism;

and

, by Javier Lodín, which discovers the influence of the announcer Ángel Álvarez on the dissemination of modern music on Spanish radio.

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