What unites Pink Floyd with rural Galicia?
By Jesus FERRER
In one of his interviews Borges maintained that “all autobiography is fiction and all fiction is autobiography.” Certainly, every life includes a narrativity where filtered memory, reliable or altered memories, the impact of time passed, and the sense of vital balance intervene. We find all of this in “Mother with an Atomic Heart,” by Agustín Fernández Mallo, a fictionalized chronicle of family experiences, with a significant subtitle – “A true story” – and penetrating intimacy. In the 1960s, the author’s father, a veterinarian deeply convinced of the emancipatory power of science, will undertake a trip to the United States in order to bring a few cows to rural Galicia where he practices his profession. These pages recall that journey, which the writer’s son will now travel, who at the same time reconstructs the stormy experiences of a generation that knew the last moments of the Alfonso monarchy, the republican gale, a fratricidal war and the Franco dictatorship.
Pink Floyd’s album
Crossing memories and stirring emotions, the narrator evokes a substantial anecdote: in his childhood, his sister brought the Pink Floyd album “Atom Heart Mother” to the family home, a vinyl that has on its cover the image of a cow that watches us with questioning human gaze. This gives rise, within the essayistic contents of the novel, to reflect on the difference between rational and irrational animality. On the other hand, time and its relationship with the death of loved ones weighs on this story of family remembrances: «The present updates everything. The value of all those things that we call ancient does not lie in singing or mourning their loss, but in the opposite: bringing them to today to see how they build our present. I say this to say that the same thing happens with the dead, especially if they are our parents. This novel represents recognition of that generation that went through the hectic 20th century.
- «Mother with an atomic heart», Agustín Fernández Mallo. SIX BARREL. 237 pages, 21 euros
No work by Rafael Reig ever seems small to us
By Angeles LOPEZ
They are not Mick Herron’s “Slow Horses.” We are in 1979. On the island of Dragonera, a crucial point in the vast Atlantic, where the shadows of English colonization are still intertwined with the present day of a country of vital strategic importance and cosmopolitan tax haven, Ginés Loyola is the puppet master in the Documentation Center, known colloquially as the Bleak House, the beating heart of the national intelligence services. Within his select team of four agile minds, each one plays his role in the dance of reports and meetings. The curtain of the everyday is torn when a bullet destroys the presidential candidate’s hopes, and worse still, when the veil is torn to reveal what compromising information has been vaporized from the archives. In this web of deception, even the most meticulously laid out plans are susceptible to the intervention of the human factor, where one detail can ruin everything.
Irony and elegance
“Anything Small” delves into the murky world of spies – nothing human is foreign to this weaver of stories – to weave a plot of fast-paced action and unbreakable suspense. Evoking the narrative mastery of Graham Greene, to give just one example, Reig adds his characteristic irony and literary elegance, giving the story its own brilliance. A captivating narrative where the characters struggle between fragmented loyalties and hidden motivations, in a deadly game where betrayal and redemption are the cards marked on the table of an uncertain destiny. And as always, the entire work is narratively constructed through a device that is as playful as it is aesthetic, without any dissonance or element or plot that clashes, since it has been practicing for decades the aristocracy of a good narrator: taking clarity and entertainment as a very moral requirement. elevated. Current literature without the presence of Rafael Reig would be lame.
- «Any small thing», Rafael Reig. TUSQUETS. 336 pages, 20.50 euros
A cañí police force full of freaks, hustlers and thugs
By Lluís FERNÁNDEZ
The author of “Gadir” is not a newcomer. She has received numerous awards and has written several novels. In “Gadir”, she echoes the angry, sometimes angry voice of the protagonist. It is Cristina Cerrada’s merit to disappear behind the male protagonist, as she already did in “Durable Alliances.” A man dissatisfied with his life, who has gone through drugs and rehabilitation. A cynic who walks through the underworld of Melilla and Cádiz in search of him, hooked on an illusion. The novel is built with excellent dialogue and little nonsense. Without annoying intrusions from the narrator. Very much to the taste of authors like Elmore Leonard, perhaps because both authors come from short stories, where concision is necessary. Cristina Cerrada follows advice from the decalogue of the author of “Raylan”: sparkling dialogues, minimal descriptive prose and the necessary detail for the detective story to advance. The first-person narrative allows the protagonist to invent his story. Like ghosts, gypsies and hustlers, thugs and corrupt managers enter and leave, flowing through the novel like presences drawn in charcoal. They all build the entity of the narrator and give density to the novel. It is comforting to read a detective novel far removed from customs. His text repudiates that tacky prose full of clichés, implausible dialogues and the inevitable fall into the soap opera.
Refined technique
His thing is the dialogues in cañí Spanish, marginal characters, scoundrel language with Andalusian phrases and words. The realistic appearance collides with implausible situations that refer to an abstract story. In “Gadir” the rhetorical seams are marked that assemble with refined technique the Frankenstein that is every novel. The one that aspires to overcome realism to put together a literary construct that makes credible a story full of geeks, paralytics and minor “Arny” type hustlers. With recourse to a postmodern ending, the narrator finds himself, like William Wilson, unfolded into the multiple facets of the self.
- «Gadir», Cristina Cerrada. LUMEN. 224 pages, 19.00 euros
Seven days are enough to meet Leibniz
By Diego GANDARA
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whose philosophy Borges admired, will always be remembered as one of the most influential thinkers in history and, above all, for having affirmed that we live in the best of all possible worlds, a way of seeing the world that is very far from a nihilistic thought but also from a thought of remote and false happiness. Michael Kempe, one of the greatest experts on Leibniz, has chosen seven key days in Leibniz’s overflowing life, dates that marked a turning point in his career and work, to give an entertaining and close biography of this philosopher born in 1646 in Leipzig, Germany, and which addressed questions related to theology, mathematics and science.
A man of passions
Thus, starting on an autumn morning in 1675 in Paris, the book expands and spreads between, on the one hand, Leibniz’s daily life, and on the other, his philosophical thought, which contributed to the independent development of calculus. infinitesimal, which he shared with Isaac Newton. An achievement that, together with his invention of the binary system, laid the foundations for modern computing. Philosopher, but also inventor, mathematician, traveler, historian and novelist, Leibniz’s passions were inexhaustible. His curiosity and fascinating personality were inexhaustible, leading him to maintain an impressive network of contacts around the world.
He served as an advisor to the House of Hanover and worked on political and legal reform projects in several European states. Known for his optimism, he insisted on the possibility of improving the world even when everything seemed bleak. Despite his numerous contributions, Leibniz was often misunderstood in his time and found himself in intellectual disputes with other prominent scholars. However, his legacy endures as a beacon of interdisciplinary and creative thought that has left an indelible mark on the history of human thought.
- “The best of all possible worlds”, Michael Kempe. TAURUS. 304 pages, 22.90 euros
