Criticism of “” Do not keep anything “★★★★★: Here are the texts that James Salter did not want them to keep
death in 2015, his wife found numerous text boxes despite what the author used to repeat: do not keep anything
By Diego Gándara
Everything a writer writes, is like that is fiction or non -fiction, or even scattered roles, end up forming what is called his work, something that many times cannot even control. And less, of course, after dead, when they appear in drawers and fads and in computers files notes, notebooks, notebooks and material that, although posthumous, will also end, being part of their work.
This is what happened with the work of James Salter (American writer born in New Jersey in 1925 and died in 2015) after his death and thanks, in some way, to his wife, who met with boxes of texts that the author of “Light years” had carefully kept, something that, according to the wife in question what Salter used to repeat often: you do not keep anything.
But Salter, however, had kept everything. And part of that whole that it kept is what constitutes “not keeping anything”, a book composed of thirty -five texts in which the author explains about the most diverse themes, on issues related to cinema, mountaineering and also with writing and literature.
Notes and drivities
“There was not only a finished copy of everything he had published, but also his notes and drafts,” recalls his wife in the preface to this book that reflects, above all, Salter’s interest in the most varied themes. But, also, it also shows something else: its acuity, which is permeated in your gaze and translates into a clear writing, sometimes distant with the reader and sometimes so close; Especially it is about counting on the trade of writing or the work of other writers, such as the one dedicated to Isaak Bábel, which is, in that sense, one of the most beautiful texts in the book: a whole song of love and fidelity to life and writing. The result is a book in which Salter also does not keep anything and, whether they are interviews with authors, travel chronicles and sports or issues related to natural beauty or his years as a hunting pilot and his participation in Korea, nothing is kept and get anything and get, with few words, say everything and say it directly, without fissures.
▲The best
The variety of issues that always cross here with a luminous writing
▼Worst
The book has no fissures, what persists is the attractive style of salter
Criticism of “Street London 38” ★★★★: The Pinochet regime and Nazism, face to face
In “London 38”, Philippe Sands coincides with the dictator with Walther Rauff, inventor of mobile gas cameras
By Jesús Ferrer
In 1998, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London, accused by a judge of the Spanish National Court of Crimes of Genocide, International Terrorism, torture and Desarition of People during the years in which the Andean country ruled. This resulted, until March of the year 2000, to a criminal process of extraordinary political and legal impact.
The writer Philippe Sands (London, 1960), specialized in International Law, has novelized this historical milestone crossing it with the personality of Walther Rauff, an officer of the German SS and inventor of the mobile gas cameras, who after the world war would be able to take refuge by administering a Chilean preservative company. The cruel dictator and the Nazi military will coincide in sinister complicities and dark interests. This book is the novel narration of this collaboration, combining in its pages the journalistic chronicle, the democratic allegation, the denunciation of violated human rights as well as the detailed story of a perverse historical time. Sands had the opportunity, hired as a lawyer by Human Rights Watch, to be a direct witness of that process against Pinochet, which allowed him to personally delve into the testimonies of those who suffered the terrible consequences of that dictatorship, with the background of the iniquities of Nazi ideology.
Amenity and rigor
This is stated in his declaration of objectives: «This is my interpretation based on what I have seen, heard or read. It is a personal trip. It is about justice, memory and impunity at different times and places; of the threads that interwoven our strange lives, in which questions and coincidences arise so often ». In addition to the legal documentation exposed with surprising amenity and thorough narrative rigor, the political ins and outs of the case are detailed, with the support of the dictator of the very Margaret Thatcher, the reception that Rauff had to integrate into a social respectability that at all deserved and the need for no impunity to be possible.
In sum, an extraordinary non -fiction novel of essential and exciting reading.
▲The best
The thrilling narrative rhythm with which this fascinating story is addressed
▼Worst
Little negative must be said of such a thorough elaboration book
Criticism of “Nothing good germina” ★★★★★: The gross gospel of Pérez Gellida
The “gellida effect” reaches “nothing good germinates” its maximum splendor in the form of a kind of ethics of narrative tension
By Ángeles López
Pérez Gellida throws the key to the bolt as only he knows how to do it: with the fair violence so that it is brightened and with the exact pace so that we do not breathe. He also adds that nihilism so his that he turns the sawdust of history into a thick légamo where emotions, rather than flourish, ferment. “Nothing good germinates” is not just a title, it is an opinion. Under its rocky surface – that of a Spain decomposed by war, epidemic and famine – there is no possible redemption, only the illusion that the sins of the past can be buried in oblivion. But Gellida, who writes as who disregards bodies with the claws, does not believe in those illusions. That is why he has created Sebastián Costa and Antonia Monterroso: two fugitives of themselves, two lovers of the knife and the burned meat, who advance on a land where each step is a betrayal and each kiss a wound.
Here the “Gellida effect” – thermal that I coined and of which I honor myself because I admire him – charges his maximum splendor. It is not just the perfect structure of the “thriller” – the persecution, the mask, the simulated shelter, the enemy’s return – is that trembling in the background, that constant suspicion that the characters are alive of more, that they feel more, that they will suffer enough so that the reader does not come out unscathed. Gellida, like the good cursed narrators, does not seek empathy; Look for complicity. Aspires to the almost arithmetic genius of suspense. It forces us to look where it hurts, and does so with the solvency of those who have been sculpting the black genre with a surgeon and the spirit of coroner for more than a decade. Monterroso is his new narrative miracle. It is not a “powerful” character, but a real woman: made of hunger, rage, dirty desire. And Sebastián Costa, mud and gunpowder hero, is the amoral reverse of an without a compass Spain. Together they make up a couple as tragic as unforgettable, as if Bonnie and Clyde had been born in an olive grove and had breastfeeding opium.
“Gellidism” is an ethic of tension again. One way to narrate the crime without mercy, but complying with it. And “nothing good germinates” is his final gospel: dreary, beautiful, cruel like history. A novel that does not bloom: burns. And in that fire, once again, this great author has achieved it.
▲The best
It is a brutally honest narrative with a suspense that leaves you breathless
▼Worst
That their extreme pessimism and emotional violence can be suffocating
Criticism of “I prescribe a cat” ★★★★: The curious healing magic of Asian fiction returns
“I prescribe a cat”, by the Japanese Syou Ishid
By Lluís Fernández
There is a realistic current Japanese literary genre but with a magical component that sometimes manifests as poetic realism and sometimes as a fantastic story displaced. In the case of “I prescribe a cat”, by the Japanese Syou Ishida, it follows both lines that unite poetic realism with the fantastic story displaced. The world created by Ishida is friendly, realistic, but in it the essential elements of the popular story are discovered: a cat that has healing properties and an eccentric psychologist and its moody nurse who remember two characters that occupy the displaced place of the kind magician and ogres.
But the subgenre that unifies the eastern novels translated in recent years in Spain is the “curative fiction.” Some, like those who treat cooking and literature in the context of a mild police (“The delicious stories of the Kamogawa tavern” by Hisashi Kashiwai or “Mrs. Yeom’s amazing store” of the South Kim Ho-Yeon South Kine); Others, as police dramas, such as “six four” by Hideo Yokoyama or Gore Dramones as “Strange Pictures” by UKETSU.
Modern life
What do such disparate novels have in common? The lightness of the police and its poetic or magical framework as a pretext to talk about the type of life of the Japanese and South Koreans, their conflictive family relationship and the stress of their rigid work lives. The literary aspect reflects this: a descriptive literature, of simple prose, divided into self -conscious chapters that are gathered in a central story that end up restoring the family and work unity lost by the dehumanization of the alienating modern life.
In this book, the poetic mixed with the magical appears, because at the same time that it subtracts lost family life and a better professional understanding, essential elements of the “curative fiction”, the episodic characters enter and leave the mysterious clinic of Kokoro trying to make sense of their lives. And it is those cats that prescription the doctor who imaginarily operate healing magic. A curious work. Kind. Magic And, in some aspect, healing.
▲The best
The goodness that distills this curative fiction throughout the plot of the work
▼ The worst
Follow the oriental fashion of a simple novel with changing characters
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