Isabel Calderón Reyes has shared three literary recommendations that promise to offer an enriching and reflective experience for readers.
Palestine in pieces
Lina Meruane –Random House, 2024.
Pieces of chronicle cross into the essay and vice versa. This fragmentary book has its origins in a trilogy (Turn Palestine, from 2012; Turn Us Others, from 2013, and Faces on My Face, from 2019) and in a family history that is also an intellectual journey. In the 2000s, a possibility of returning to Palestine began to take shape for Lina Meruane, a Chilean writer of Italian and Palestinian descent.
On a trip to Beit Jala, he met some paternal aunts with whom he had no contact. And in the critical reading of authors such as Edward Said, Amos Oz and Susan Sontag he found not a “key” to understanding the conflict, as the cliché would suggest, but but several doors with rusty padlocks, rusty chains of historical debts, uses of language, racism and silences. Of the current interpretations of the siege in the Gaza Strip, many place the attack of October 7 as a beginning, a trigger. That is why it is urgent to read works such as Meruane’s, who do not forget that the past exists: All the fragments of the book were written before October 2023, and yet in them the practices of the Israeli occupation against the Palestinians are clear, eerily clear.
The shop of smiles
Satoshi Kitamura – Panamericana, 2023.
Satoshi Kitamura still comes up with new ways to use colors. The Japanese author, who has been writing and illustrating children’s books for more than forty years, changed the greens and yellows of his board books for a soft palette that suggests diluted (even stained) watercolors and chose to return to the city. , after having published many titles starring animals with googly eyes living among the trees and the blue sky. The choice of muted colors in The Smile Shop is not just a detail. It may be a desire to avoid saturation, a search for a non-verbal language that aligns precisely with the story Kitamura wants to tell..
A child has money for the first time to go to the market and buy something. Happiness turns into anxiety: he could buy a dessert, a toy boat, a watch, many other things… and in each store there are thousands of versions of all the objects. The fine yet imprecise lines of the illustrations emphasize this abundance that becomes overwhelming. When we are absorbed in this world created to confuse us, an accident changes the course of the journey and the child finally finds something he wants.
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Córdoba skies
Federico Falco – Laguna, 2024.
There are sparrows on the branches of an elm tree. They are fighting and their sounds fill the waiting room of a hospital. A boy, almost a teenager, wanders around. The waiting room is almost empty and so is he. We do not see or hear his thoughts; the narrator observes him and describes his actions from a distance that respects him and makes him mysterious.
There are also animals in the river, where the boy goes when he is not in the hospital: a heron takes his time fishing, some bream caress his feet and then he hears toads and owls. Phosphorescent lights and television game shows complete the picture. All the characters, human, animal, inanimate, are part of a world that Falco constructs to situate that moment between childhood and adolescence, full of losses and with some discoveries.
