A box of books for the summer

Luis Mateo Díez, well-deserved Cervantes Prize 2024, is a sure value for those who have not entered his novel world, and a pleasant option for those of us who have read him since his time as a university student, since his first success, ‘The Source of the age’. Delve now into ‘Voices of the Mirror’, representative stories of his work as a novelist, enjoy his language and discover why Celama, the mythical place of his novels, is on a par with Macondo or Comala, to name two literary references that always come up. brought up when we talk about Luis Mateo Díez.

And from one Cervantes Prize to another. We talk about Cristina Peri Rossi and her new narrative installment, ‘Strange Couples’. A writer who is, in the words of Reina Roffé, “a craftsman who always looks for the appropriate material to give shape to an idea, the most suggestive image, the most brilliant metaphor.” Her latest book brings together stories with real and mythical characters such as Marilyn Monroe or Lewis Carrol, in stories full of imagination and humor. Baudelaire, Salinger, Francis Bacon… are just some of the protagonists of these ‘Strange Couples’. A powerful, intense book that exudes tenderness.

With ‘Four Quantum Tales’ we enter the garden of paths that branch to always return to the starting point. The search for primal emotion and its connection with the world. What a warm Borgesian simile for an introduction. But how to approach or deal with the verification that what we call reality is nothing more than a field of infinite probabilities that only collapses into a specific reality? And ‘Four Quantum Tales’ could only have been written by an Argentinian since it continues the story tradition of his literary references: Borges, Cortázar.

Spain exudes idolatry, apostasy and superstition, says the preface to this edition of ‘Magical Spain’. And the history of Spain is not only that of its conquerors and adventurers. So is that other hidden story, which does not usually appear in books and which we often tend to ignore. And that’s what this book is about. From the Holy Company, the Inquisition, witchcraft practices, pagan cults, or the secret societies that abounded throughout the geography: Freemasonry, the Communards, the Society of the Ring, the Holy Alliance… Approach without fear, listen to me.

One of the most repeated Celtic legends is the one about the adventures of the noble knights of the Round Table. We know the original narrative, the adventures of King Arthur and his brave knights always in search of the Holy Grail, as well as the love/heartbreak story of Lancelot of Lake and Guinevere or of Tristan and Isolde. The story of King Arthur is undoubtedly the most important legend of those written in the Middle Ages. Delve into the Arthurian myth, let yourself be surrounded by the spell of the Lady of the Lake and the Wizard Merlin and seek the Grail, eternal youth.

A total novel about the Spanish civil war in the key of magical realism? ‘The Peninsula of Empty Houses’ is a novel of characters, and it is the story of the decomposition of a family, of the dehumanization of a town, of the disintegration of a territory, of a territory, plagued by empty houses. And yes, it is the story of the Spanish civil war, of a country that is dying where Alberti, Lorca, Unamuno, Orwell, Picasso and Azaña cross their destinies. A novel that can or should be read as the unfinished study of a country that has been dying for too many years.

Luis Landero never disappoints in the construction of that literary edifice that he has been building since those ‘Late Age Games’. Now he presents ‘The Last Function’, a novel in which a group of retirees remember that afternoon in 1994 when Tito Gil, a once-busy actor who was said to have triumphed on the stages of the capital, was to return to town. The last performance tells the story of a reunion, of some towns that languish throughout the Spanish geography and that only hope can make them reborn behind the scenes of an old theater.

The crime novel can and should break some molds. «He needs to take a leap into the void, and a strange pirouette in the air. The requirement is not to have vertigo or fear,” says David Llorente, author of the celebrated and award-winning novel ‘I love you because you feed me’. And now that ten years have passed since that first edition with which he “broke the mold” in all the competitions he presented, what better tribute can be paid to him than to approach a work that is disturbing and brutal by definition. A novel with which it is inevitable to feel some empathy for the murderer. A great choice for this summer.

Frank Kafka, without a doubt, occupies a privileged place within universal literature. Two volumes, ‘Stories and Aphorisms’, collect both the short work in the first, those stories prepared by the author and published during his lifetime in three anthologies, in addition to ‘La Condemnation’, an essential text, and the short novel ‘In the penitentiary colony’, while the second volume brings together one hundred and nine aphorisms written between the spring of 1918 and the second half of 1920. Among them ‘Letting the head full of disgust and hatred fall on the chest’. Kafka in its purest form in this edition of Alianza.

A shape-shifting tiger and a pretentious rat. A cunning princess and a prince who returns from the dead or a benevolent goddess and a powerful demon are just some examples of this selection of the best stories from the oriental tradition of peoples such as India and Japan, ancient cultures and legends that have come down to this day with the same freshness of the oral tradition with which they were created. ‘Tales from India’ is a magnificent opportunity to enter a magical and disturbing world beautifully illustrated by its compilers.

As in her previous installments, María Tena continues to investigate that intimate literature so characteristic of all her work. She thus returns with a novel anchored in the subjectivity of a woman who has just been detected with a lump in her breast, and whose admission to a clinic will become a life lesson for her. Teresa, the protagonist, will go through different emotional states, fear, pain, hope, optimism… creating an environment far from the foreseeable suffering. ‘Life on the edge’ is, ultimately, a praise of the healing power of words through the stories of a hospital.

‘A sunny place for gloomy people’ is the third book of stories by Mariana Enríquez (Buenos Aires, 1973), a well-known author within the Anagrama catalogue. This new publication is made up of twelve stories where, as is customary in her work, ghosts and monsters appear, in addition to the dark and gloomy predominating through unusual events. Elements that can be considered as something typical of the fantastic, so peculiar in the Argentine literary tradition, even more so in the genre of the story. “A dark and captivating narrator,” in the words of Javier Calvo.

After the series of novels starring Fernando de Rojas, whom he turned into a kind of Sherlock Holmes of the Spanish Renaissance, the writer Luis García Jambrina returns to bookstores with a historical ‘thriller’ starring, nothing more and nothing less, Miguel of Unamuno, who begins an investigation to discover who has killed the chief of a municipality of Boada. With a beginning, it is assumed that paying homage to Clarín and ‘La Regenta’, ‘The First Case of Unamuno’ is the first of a series of works that will delight its readers.

Intense and vibrant, this novel of unusual modernity written in 1934 and set in a Paris immersed in the devastating economic crisis of that decade, is a small masterpiece about money, dishonor and the pain of existing in which Irene Némirovsky portrays with his characteristic lucidity the desperation of a man marked by the adverse circumstances of the time. It is a new example of the author’s narrative talent and a brave exploration of the complex bond between an unscrupulous father and a son without aspirations, a simple pawn on the board of life.

Fifty years since that romantic revolution that would end the dictatorship of General Salazar. A revolution of which Diego Carcedo, author of ‘The Carnation Revolution’, would be an exceptional witness, which immerses us in the entire maelstrom of events experienced from that dawn in 1974. Decisive moments of a close and brother country, which would liquidate the last remaining colonial empire in the world. The carnation revolution resonates as a mandatory reminder of the power of a people to change the course of their own history.

Celia Fremlin, for some the British Patricia Highsmith, reveals herself as a biting master in creating an atmosphere of mystery and nightmare in which the ideas of femininity and motherhood twist tortuously. A suspense novel that revolves around a middle-class housewife in suburban London in the 1950s. In ‘The Hours Before Dawn’, a submissive wife, a demanding husband and a mysterious tenant whom they think they recognize, although They do not know how to locate it, they make up the portrait of a sick society. The suspense is served.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a young columnist who goes by the name of Julio Camba will arrive in different European cities with the help of the newspaper ‘El Mundo’. Paris, London, Milan, Rome, Berlin… will be just some of his destinations and excuses for the chronicles that he will promptly deliver to said newspaper. Acid and often humorous columns, which certainly never go unnoticed in a Spain accustomed to not laughing at itself. Thus, for several years, Camba would write hundreds of articles, for some the corpus of his work. Camba is a bourgeois, and behaves as such in his life and work. But he also has space to write about ‘night clubs’, the rise of cafes in Berlin, the Parisian Latin Quarter, or the birth of advertisement men.