Spring is that season that always returns full of books, that celebrates its day and is filled with book fairs. In its pages, spring happens just as splendidly, illuminating the lives of its characters among clouds and clearings, and already announcing itself from the title. here they go nine suggestions to also enjoy spring with a book in your hands. From the ‘Spring’ of Ali Smith to the ‘Extremaduran Spring’, of Julio Llamazares. From the classic ‘spring waters‘, of Ivan Turgenev to the naturalistic thoughts of the pioneers of environmentalism Henry David Thoreau and Susan Fenimore Cooper.
Floating in the typical bright and blue sky are white clouds that look like freshly washed sheep. They are still there at the top, but on the ground everything is moved by a disturbed wind that comes rolling down the avenue. Who knows where it ripped off these tiny leaves, particles that spread across the sidewalk and stick to the bottom of our pants while we wait to cross the street. Seeds and dust. In the city, spring is capricious and brings not butterflies but sheep. White sheep like clouds.
in the novel Springthird title of Seasonal Quartet of Ali Smith, one of the characters has an epiphany when he goes to an exhibition by the British artist Tacita Dean where there are clouds drawn with chalk on black board and a huge mountain from which an avalanche rushes towards the viewer. As he leaves, he feels that in front of that threatening mountain that took his breath away, the clouds form a fabric where he can breathe: “After those clouds, those in the London sky seemed different, as if they were something that could be interpreted as a space to breathe.” . And that also affected the buildings below the clouds, the traffic, the way the streets crossed, the way people passed each other on the street, all of it was part of a structure that was unknown. structure, but it was equally so.”
Despite portraying a selfish and fearful society seduced by Brexit, which imprisons and forgets migrants in detention centers, Spring It is a novel crossed by the light of the season, which pushes its characters to embrace life and opens a door to hope. “If you pass any flowering bush or tree, it will be impossible not to hear the rumble of the engine, the new life already in motion, the factory of time,” says Ali Smith.
Life is also reborn when everything is stopped in Extremaduran spring, of Julio Llamazares, where the author recounted the three months he spent confined with his family in a house in the Sierra de los Lagares while the pandemic, like Tacita Dean’s threatening mountain, darkens the world outside. But in the fields the clouds bring storms that in the peaceful passing of the days will make nature explode in violent nuances: “It had rained so much in April that the heat absorbed the humidity forming clouds that after a few days would release water again and so every little time. […] The intense green of April was now succeeded by the gold of dry hay, and the whitish glow of the wild oats on the roadsides, and the violet of the lilacs and the wild lilies, and the white of the rockrose flower…
This is how spring usually crosses the days: in full color, oblivious to the disaster of the world. And against its radiance the trail of what men destroy burns, as in the wars on the news, as in die in springthe novel by the German poet and playwright Ralf Rothmann, where the young Walter and Friedrich, who worked in a dairy farm, are recruited at the end of the Second World War: “The wisps of clouds were running over the fields and there were vehicles burning everywhere. Neither grenade launchers nor heavy artillery fire could be heard. From time to time a machine-gun volley resounded or a ball of fire rose into the sky and fell smoking into the valley: red, green and white lights that illuminated the rivers and under which the shadows of solitary trees danced.
The American Great Depression stains the winter clouds gray in Wait for spring, Bandinithe first novel by John Fante, in which a teenager Arturo Bandini, the author’s alter ego who will star in a tetralogy, longs for his arrival as he leaves behind his childhood in a family of Italian emigrants that falls apart when the father leaves home. The memory of youth and his mistakes are the background on which it takes place. spring watersa classic of Ivan Turgenev where the warm rays of the sun pierce the windows of 19th-century cafes and salons dressed in velvet. Its golden reflections also illuminate the intimacy of the family routine in the volume In springthe third of the Quartet of the Seasons by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgårdwhere he narrates with his characteristic cadence a single day in the life of a father and his few-month-old daughter.
Spring is that season that always returns full of books. And also in them everything happens on a small scale: the buds that open and the insects, the respiration of the flowers, the pollen suspended in the light, the raindrops. Everything we would like to capture with words before it disappears. The thoughts of Henry David Thoreau arising from the meticulous contemplation of that effervescent nature are gathered in the volume Spring. And after her country excursions, the naturalist Susan Fenimore Cooper wrote in his rural diary of spring the story of how ephemeral and changing, how beautiful this season is: “Cloudy day. We took a nice boat ride on the lake. The field, seen from the water, looked lovely, adorned with the floral trophies of May. Many of the fruit trees are still in bloom, in orchards and orchards, while wild cherry and plum trees dripped into the water in many spots. The late night was calm, perfect, without a breath to stir the lake, and the soft spring appearance of the mountains and fields, illuminated by their young greenery, has been covering the waters.
Although in the urban setting, where people get sick from loneliness, the season can color everything with melancholy as in the delicate novel The spring garden of the Japanese writer Tomoka Shibasakiwhose protagonist, Taro, the last inhabitant of a building that is going to be demolished, lives in love with a blue house.
Here, in the city, spring occurs with less fuss, it is trapped in the parks and fluffs on the balconies or in the trees on the sidewalk, in those clouds like sheep that appear from time to time between the buildings. Or in that plastic bag that flutters swollen as if it had trapped the air inside, the light of this dazzling atmosphere that today surrounds everything and seems to put us in a good mood. Yes, spring is spreading something life-giving around. Tacita Dean, the ephemeral artist who has been collecting four-leaf clovers all her life, filmed the visual poem in 1995 A Bag of Air: a three-minute 16 mm short film where a voice in off He explains the instructions to collect that air in a bag “so intoxicated with the essence of spring that when distilled and prepared, it will produce a golden oil, a sufficient remedy to cure all ailments.”
About the Author
Ana Esteban
Ana Esteban is a traveler, on inside-out or outside-in journeys. She is the author of the novels It’s Only Rain (Debate), The Light Under the Dust (Ediciones del Viento), and the book of stories Peces de charco (Baile del Sol). She has published articles, film and book criticism, interviews and chronicles in El País, El Semanal, El Asombrario, Buensalvaje and other publications.
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