Fifteen proposals that in these moments when the harvest is plentiful, could well be thirty. But if all those who are are not there, they are all who are there.
In The Queen of the Dance (Anagrama) the Argentine writer Camila Fabbri offers us a novel with varied scenes, focused on humor, orality, attraction to bodies, the company of animals and the fight against loneliness. The immediacy of her reading contrasts with that of the also Argentine Rodrigo Fresán in The Style of the Elements (Random House), a novel in which we read the thoughts of the narrator, where the important thing is not what is told but how it is told. . An unconventional proposal that always keeps the reader alert.
The secret nature of the things of this world by also Argentine Patricio Pron (Anagrama), revolves around oblivion, memories, appearance, disappearance, escape, journey and the need to return. Everything in this fascinating narrative has something unreal and ghostly. Another Argentine is Mariana Enríquez. Her story A sunny place for gloomy people (Anagrama) is a collection of stories of very varied registers, where terror is joined by metamorphoses, the monstrous, or critical references to her country. In Praise of the Hands (Brief Library Award, Seix Barral), by Jesús Carrasco, we witness a tense process of construction of what is condemned to be demolished. The novel is, above all, a passionate praise of craftsmanship.
Consecrated writers deserve a separate paragraph. Eduardo Mendoza in Three Enigmas for the Organization (Seix Barral) returns to a Barcelona, familiar to the author of The City of Prodigies. A magnificent example of how you can write a positively conventional novel, unmistakably Mendoza due to its attractive fluidity, the observation of everyday life and a humor that borders on satire. For his part, Mario Vargas Llosa pays tribute to his Peru in I dedicate my silence to him, now through the vindication of the Creole waltz, of which he shows himself to be a true connoisseur, and also of his Lima neighborhood, Miraflores, here as a degraded environment . There is a passion that is always transmitted in his (Alfaguara) writing.
As for In August See You (Random House), by Gabriel García Márquez, regardless of the uproar that its publication has caused, we are pleasantly surprised by the novelty of the plot, the meticulously crafted prose, the company of the bolero and the splendid portrait of Ana Magdalena Bach and her love adventures.
In The Last Function (Tusquets), by Luis Landero, Ernesto Gil, “the verb made music,” contributes to the resurrection and agony of a town by bringing to the stage the recovery of a legend. And if that child managed to extract brilliance and nuances unknown until then from the words, the same thing happens with the prose of this attractive novel. The stories in The Furniture of the World (Seix Barral), by Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, arise from strangeness, fable, the unusual. Here, too, the words “like a goldsmith searches for the most exact cut for a diamond” are sought, in a prose that underlines “the ability to tell the world in images.”
In The White Desert (Anagrama), by Luis López Carrasco, the fact that the action occurs in a balloon, like Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon, allows the action to be replaced by memories and imaginary experiences, giving a great freedom of an unusual story.
In Los abismos (Alfaguara) by Pilar Quintana, the violence, so present in the Colombian narrative, is now no longer political but occurs in family relationships. Within nature, the setting plays an important role, with striking descriptions. In This wound full of fish (Tránsito) the Colombian Lorena Salazar Masso moves in a Caribbean landscape here “witnessing cries and blood.” For Salazar, the music and oral tradition in which she grew up have been important to her, and the reader participates in the charm of this orality.
The reader is not deterred by the eight hundred pages of the celebrated, due to its daring commitment, Los Escorpiones (Lumen), by Sara Barquinero. The story focuses on the generation that seems to be defined by uncontrollable digital technologies, drugs, music and fashion, all stimulated by a secret society that controls the minds of consumers. Absorbing portrait of disturbing topicality.
And last but not least, Monika Zgustova's novel Soy Milena de Prague / Soc la Milena de Prague (Galaxia Gutenberg), aimed at lovers of Kafka, and, of course, of good literature. The one who tells the story is Milena Jesenská, which is also a novel about the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Gestapo, the concentration camps and, above all, a forceful condemnation of totalitarianism. A novel of varied registers, it is a powerful document of an era.
