There are works that require a lifetime to be composed. Or books to be written. This is the case of ‘Reguetón’ (Edit. Mercurio, 2024), the new novel by the La Palma writer Luis León Barreto, which will be presented on June 18, at 7:00 p.m., at the Pérez Galdós House-Museum. Presented by the authors Rosario Valcárcel and Victoriano Santana Sanjurjo, entry to the event is free of charge, until capacity is reached.
After thirty books published, León Barreto’s new novel is, for critics, “the result of the necessary conceptual, stylistic and rhetorical consistency”, conditions that can only be obtained after having traveled a long vital and creative career. . This is the case of ‘Reggaeton’, by Luis León Barreto, a novel that, from its very statement, intensely embraces the deep meaning of the Latin phrase ‘carpe diem’, present in so many artistic and literary manifestations of the West, from its appearance in Horace’s Odes to being the main reference of pages that invite us to celebrate life to take advantage of each and every one of the moments that give color to our existence and that manage to mitigate, even if only in part, the thickness of the shadows that cover us daily in the form of sadness, misfortune, inconveniences and uncertainties, quotes the synopsis of the book.
Professor Francisco Juan Quevedo, from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, assures that the author, “through a choral design, presents us with the dialogue of a group of friends who question very diverse topics: love and sex. , artificial intelligence, politics, climate change, the existence of God, nationalisms, etc. For the German philosopher Friedrich Von Schlegel, life is an endless conversation, and here there is no a priori condemnation of the ideas of others but rather the characters debate their own conflicts, it is, therefore, an x-ray of society. current written by an author who safely and effectively handles the resources of narration, as he becomes a good observer and chronicler of reality.”
Professor Quevedo defines the book, edited by Mercurio, as “a novel of maturity, the fruit of a long career in which the author has offered us more than thirty books, especially novels but also short stories, crime novels, essays , current articles, as well as analysis of very diverse topics offered to us in the newspaper La Provincia and in numerous digital newspapers.”
celebrate life
According to the critic Victoriano Santana Sanjurjo, who has been the literary editor of this work, “the novel offers us a pleasant recipe book on how to try to achieve well-being. Let’s celebrate life, because everything is never definitively lost. The most important thing is to learn to be a survivor, you have to know how to ward off stalking and think that the day that has just been born is the best gift we have in our hands. Well, life is a wonderful risk and that is why we have to capture all the moments. Now that our totem is money and we are guided by immediate enjoyment, does ethics make any sense? Some may think that life has no meaning, but we have no choice but to live it to the fullest. Therefore, we must celebrate the inexact or unfinished. All of this may be difficult to reconcile with the idea of living fast and taking full advantage of the possibilities that life offers us, but the future is full of hope.”
About the Author
Luis León Barreto is a writer born in Los Llanos de Aridane and belonging to the Generation of the 70s. With more than thirty books published, he has dedicated himself mainly to novels, but he has also written essays, short story books, compilations of journalistic articles , stories for children, crime novels and, to a lesser extent, poetry.
As a journalist, he has worked in various media outlets. He was editor-in-chief of the Diario de Las Palmas, deputy director of the newspaper La Provincia, and director, for fifteen years, of the Club Prensa Canaria.
Co-founder and president of the Canarian Association of Writers (ACAE), he appears in various anthologies, including ‘One Hundred Years of Tales’ (1898-1998), ‘Anthology of the Story in Castilian’, by José María Merino (Edit. Alfaguara , 1998); ‘Kanarska kratka prica’, an anthology of storytellers published in Croatia, and in the volume ‘The best Canarian stories of the 20th century’, compiled by Juan José Delgado (2004).
As a narrator of short stories, he appears in important anthologies by the Alfaguara publishing house and is the author of the famous novel ‘Las espiritistas de Telde’, with multiple editions in Spanish and five translations. His latest novel is ‘Reggaeton’, published by Editorial Mercurio.
