Catrileo, what a voice

Just as it was promised and then dispromised and then promised again, without saying it, that is, taking it for granted, we are still in the south, dear reader.

And, in addition to the fact that we are still in the south, because the previous installment generated several interesting comments on the issue of strategies to overcome the rush of fashions that has taken hold of bookstores, we also continue with that issue, that of those strategies.

It is, therefore, this new installment of our lyrics, another combat strategy.

Pull the thread or chain

For years, if not for a very long time, not to say forever, the reader who passes by without looking at the bookstore windows and also ignoring the tables that are increasingly more and that sometimes seem like property of the distributors or the publishers, has known that the best thing he can do, when he finds, in the booksellers who cling to the increasingly strange criterion of pure and simple reading, a book that reaches him, shaking his sensitivity or his intellectuality, is to throw away of its author's thread.

I mean that, when you find a novel that gets inside you and then, entrenching itself there, somewhere inside us, it lights up something that had been off or allows our gaze, newly modified, to shine in a certain way. different from the outside, you have to look for all the links in the chain that that author is launching into the world, no matter how difficult or easy it is to get them and starting from the idea that, most of the time, they cannot be found. It will be a simple task, but it will be a rebellion against the trends to which bookstores (unfortunately, it also seems to happen to the majority of publishers) seem to have surrendered.

The reader who agrees to do this, that is, to flush the toilet, will also enter that other dimension that exceeds the work - a dimension that the speed of fashions also attacks - and which is the one in which a book For example, a novel is nothing more than an ecosystem in a much more complex nature;

Yes, we may prefer one or another type of ecosystem, but sometimes the tundra is capable of lighting up the desert, just as the desert is capable of lighting up the jungle, when it comes to the jungle, the desert and the tundra of the nature of a specific author.

In my case, to give a quick example, the first that comes to mind, although it is not from a writer from our latitudes or our language, is that of Emmanuel Bove, whose chain I have been pulling for at least fifteen years.

Catrileo Chain

Of course, the types of chains are multiple and different, just as the reasons why one, as a reader, decides to pull one or another chain are multiple and different: it may be out of admiration, it may be out of personal interest or affinity. , it may be out of amazement or surprise, it may be out of mere pleasure or pure discomfort.

The thing is, however, when one decides that the book he read should inspire him to continue, not to be afraid of adding more and more chains.

For example, I have just added to my group the chain of the Chilean Daniela Catrileo, whose book of stories

Piñen

- as Hannah Arendt said: subjects must be seen without the right to have rights - launched me into

Guerra florida,

which led to his wonderful

Río Hurt

and Chilco, his most recent novel, which I finished recently.

That's why I want to say a couple of things about that novel:

Chilco,

in addition to telling, without telling it directly, the outbreak that Chile experienced before Boric came to power and before the constituent disaster, that is, the rebellion, but, above all, everything, what led to it, what it showed, what it camouflaged and what it left in the shadows — “Madam, it seems that you lost your home.

Her husband has been swallowed by a sinkhole.

You are living in a tent: do you already know where you will spend Christmas?”—is a brilliant and painful dissection of the current moment of the world, as a common space but also home to individuals whose intimacies and stories are reached by the power of it. so that their bodies, relationships, environments and conditions are effective.

Beyond telling wonderfully—playing with the form, too, since it would seem that the chapters are given to the reader as the player is given his cards—the story of a revolt, of a couple—that of Marina, who is the narrator, and Pascale—, of that power that never loses, of an escape, of a pair of languages ​​that resist, of a present that collapses and of a system that denies otherness even where otherness is, in reality, the norm, has another virtue: telling from a place of permanent discomfort.

“The priorities of those who are not born into the realm of privilege, but are subjugated to the ideology of success, can be an incomprehensible mystery to those who dream of romanticized worker profiles.

Joy and desire are a flicker in a tedious life of automatisms.

That is why the carnival exists, the relief and surrender to banalities, as soon as Friday arrives and the factory closes.”

Coordinates

Chilco

was published by Seix Barral.

Piñen

was published by Editorial Pez Espiral and is also in the Las Cercas edition.

Guerra florida

was published by Del aire editors, while

Río wounded

was published by Libros del perro negro.

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