Ten novels recommended for the summer

For five days in November 2011, a considerable number of young Egyptians confronted the military junta that had succeeded the coup d’état against Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The security forces that repressed the demonstrations aimed directly at the eyes of those boys with rubber bullets not only to teach them a lesson, but to make them traceable thanks to that brutal stigma. About that dismaying episode, in the face of which the West maintained a thunderous silence, Rocío Lardinois has written ‘The One-Eyed Boys’, a magnificent and heartbreaking novel whose heroes are Ali, one of the young people who lost an eye in those revolts, and Professor, a crippled and elderly man who helps him when he is chased by plainclothes agents during curfew.

‘The revelation’ has justifiably been one of the successes of the editorial course. In this novel, the American writer AM Homes fables about a bizarre conspiracy, but not as imaginary as would be desirable. The action takes place in 2008, when Obama has just won the elections and panic spreads among Republicans, especially among the owners of large fortunes. A group led by the Big Fish, a demagogue who lives in Palm Springs, is mobilized to provoke a shift in public opinion and act against the government in the least legal way. The discovery of the novel is the gallery of characters that parades around this ‘plot against America’, the most successful being the leader himself, who, despite wanting to embody the moral virtues of the nation, is experiencing a great family crisis with a daughter. rebellious and an alcoholic wife.

In ‘A las dos será las tres’, Sergi Pàmies offers us ten stories that have in common that fine humour and elegant restraint with which the Catalan-language writer has always overcome the most problematic, hard or downright sad aspects of existence. In the book that opens the volume, ‘La segunda persona’, he narrates the autobiographical experience of an unpleasant criticism that his first verses received from a consecrated poet, a friend of his parents. In ‘Días histórico’, he addresses the subject of Franco’s death with an ironic scepticism about collective conscience and memory. The volume closes with another meta-literary story, ‘La narrativa breve’, starring an ‘alter ego’ burdened with ailments and thwarted by the stifling heat of a June in the Seat Leon that he drives on the way into Barcelona.

With ‘The Last Performance’, Luis Landero returns to the narrative of innocence with which he became known in ‘The Games of Late Age’, to a story of poor human beings in need of illusions to live. The novel opens with the arrival of Tito, a mature and disastrous actor, to the town where he was born and raised. We are soon informed of a saint, the Niña Rosalba, who is venerated in that town and around whom there is a versified script that will constitute that last performance to which the title of the book alludes and in which our man manages to embark the entire rural community as an opportunity to attract tourism. But, for the performance of the play, the actor needs an actress. He will find her in Paula, a woman who, at forty years old, feels that her life has been a failure, but who is becoming a luminous being.

To write ‘Music in the Dark’, Antonio Iturbe was inspired by a true story: that of Mariano Lozano Sesma, a tailor by profession and excellent clarinetist who, in 1930, arrived with his wife to the rural neighborhood of Casetas to take charge of a municipal band made up of men from the countryside who lacked basic training. Thanks to the affection and respect that he knew how to earn from those modest people, he was named mayor of that town in January 1936. It was that fact and his faith in education as an essential instrument for the modernization of the country that led to his execution at the two months after the Civil War began. Iturbe manages to make a strongly emotional novel in which art and culture appear as a means of personal and collective redemption. Among the characters, the author’s own saxophonist grandfather shines.

‘Solito’ is an exceptional autobiographical novel in which Javier Zamora narrates in the first person an exciting and heartbreaking story that is coincidentally his own, that of a Salvadoran child born in 1990 who misses his parents who fled to the United States because of the Civil War that devastated his country between 1980 and 1992. When he is nine years old, this child embarks on a long journey in the company of some unknown people through Guatemala, Mexico and the Sonoran desert until reaching ‘The USA’, as he calls the country where his parents have taken refuge in this text sprinkled with genuinely colloquial terms from the popular slang of El Salvador. An adventure of five thousand kilometers that lasted two months and that is recorded in these testimonial pages full of anguish, but also of vital force and filial love.

In ‘El niño’ Fernando Aramburu addresses the tragedy that the Biscayan town of Ortuella experienced in the autumn of 1980 when a propane gas explosion took the lives of fifty children between the ages of five and six who were in the classrooms of a public school. The novel introduces us to that tragedy through Nicasio, the grandfather of one of the child victims, who regularly goes to the cemetery alone to have long conversations with his grandson. Widowed and retired, this character, who is the most successful in the book, moves between a fidelity to the memory of the child, which borders on extravagance, and a feeling of protection towards his daughter, the child’s mother. The novel, written with sensitivity and intelligence, has a surprise in store in the final section that manages to take the text out of the strict monothematic register of mourning.

The social integration of queer sexuality is the theme of ‘Tesis sobre una domesticación’, a novel by Camila Sosa Villada whose protagonist is a transsexual actress who forms a family with a homosexual lawyer and an adopted child who is HIV-positive. The title of the book already warns the reader of a problematic approach that is alien to political correctness, as is the case with all the work of this deeply incisive author. In fact, in the text it is not clear to us whether we are dealing with the legitimate effort of a transsexual being to access the happiness and respectability to which he is entitled or with an imposture that oppresses and alienates him to the point of experiencing it as a theatrical performance that is added to his professional facet. What, at a given moment, will burst all the conventional seams of this couple are the virulent drives of desire.

‘La seca’ is an excellent novel by Txani Rodríguez, whose protagonist is a middle-aged woman, Nuria, who returns with her mother to the village where she spent her childhood summers, located in the province of Cádiz. The text establishes a structural parallel between the natural landscape, which is undergoing serious changes due to an illness affecting the cork oak forests, and the emotional reactions that the female character feels in the face of the poor health of her mother, an older woman who is no longer in full possession of her faculties and who sometimes has manic or childish reactions. This contrast between the two women occupies a central place in the plot, as well as that of her own memories with the reality of the town. And to all this is added a love illusion from the past that seems to be falsely revived. A perfect read for the summer.

‘All Happy Families’ is an autobiographical novel in which Hervé Le Tellier settles accounts with the parents who did not want to raise him. She did not even inherit the surname from his mother and she never got along in the slightest with her stepfather. In this way, he did not feel the death of either of them. But the second one helped him “discover that his mother was crazy.” The best thing about this starkly sincere and honest book when it comes to describing a certainly dysfunctional family picture are the phrases that are not without humor: “My mother and Guy were a strange example of an inseparable couple without love.” In fact, the mother gives a lot of play in the text because of her obsession with appearances or because of her unexpected reactions, such as the irritation she felt at the funeral of her second husband when she saw her sister crying. as if she were his widow.