Full-time writer and literary critic, Toni Montesinos (Barcelona, 1971) – collaborator in this supplement and also editor-in-chief of the magazine Qué leer – decided to dedicate himself to literature due to a linguistic drive that would allow him to express himself through vocabulary. Already a writer who was blurred in adolescence and a tireless reader, he has become an expert in Western literature and today is the author of numerous essays.
Far North on the Murky Sea: A History of English Literature is the first of his last two works, encompassing authors as distant in time as Geoffrey Chaucer, Graham Greene, and Kazuo Ishiguro. In this essay, Montesinos manages to concoct a story where everything is interconnected and treats all the authors who appear in the book equally, both a language beautician like James Joyce and Agatha Christie who was –and still is– the queen of entertainment. Montesinos, far from literary idolatry, speaks of great writers in their most vulnerable aspects and greatly relativizes history, which he himself observes as a thread that traces a whole, difficult to dismember.
The female preponderance of the essay is surprising with authors such as Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and the Brontë sisters. “Absolute geniuses”, according to the author, who believes that the fact that they had to make three times more effort than men gives them superior strength.
Montesinos has also written books on French literature such as Palabrería deluxe: from illustration to Houellebecq (Subsoil, 2021) and American literature with The Unstoppable Passion: Success and Rage in North American Narrative (Pre-Texts, 2013), where he delves into the life of authors such as William Faulkner, Patricia Highsmith and Paul Auster. And as if that were not enough, he has delved into the figures of H. D. Thoreau and Walt Whitman and has written a book on "the five giants of literature" ( Write. Read. Live , Subsoil, 2017), with Goethe, Tolstoy, Mann, Zweig and Kafka as protagonists. Nothing ambitious.
Poetry, novels and travelogues are also on his list of works and he plans one on Russian literature. In The Honest Fragment, the second book that the author offers us, he moves away from essayistic objectivity to create a diary of passions, in which he writes about his tastes as a person and as a reader who loves art, music and the basketball. “They are images of someone who listens on the street, someone who looks at a painting, someone who feels the stab of a nostalgic memory.” More than forty is fast, and this is the number of his books that we can find in bookstores.
The amenity of Montesinos' texts allows him to reach a wide range of readers, from the most erudite to the least demanding. Without distinguishing between literary currents or emphasizing (implicitly or explicitly) his knowledge –which is a lot– the author approaches his works “with a point of daring to delight by instructing”. For this he moves away from academic petulance and writes books where literary currents converse with each other.
As he told me in a conversation we shared, what he enjoys most about his work as an essayist is his work as a researcher. One who receives rewards in the form of small discoveries when seeing that an event from the past can be related to the present – whether aesthetically, culturally or intellectually – such as reading Timothy Bright from the 1500s and realizing that the cult of the body and health has been developing for a few hundred years or the melancholy with which the progress of science was observed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is not very different from the catastrophic speculations of technological progress.
In an era of political hypersensitivity, Montesinos defends the importance of authors not lowering their expectations of themselves and being brave to speak openly about all issues, even though this may make the most sensitive uncomfortable: “The great writer is the one who starting from seemingly insignificant details suggests that he has understood the human soul and the pain that this implies”.
Like music and art, literature is an artistic genre and must remain so, and for this, aesthetics can never cease to be an incentive. Montesinos confesses that entertainment books that neglect style are not interesting to him at all. The author opts for authors who challenge and remind us how ephemeral we are. Readings that help us rest knowledge and fight against inertia and empty behavior. In his words, whose selection is always exquisite: “Authors who crumble life”.
As a literary archaeologist, the author rescues classics, where the poetic and linguistic canons seemed to respond to greater self-demand. Books that stir consciences and appeal to us as human beings. And for this, what better way than to refresh the history of letters and see who is important to read and who is not.
