I have not included here, for the reader's relief, writers who do not stop giving their opinions in public. Among them is, and out of modesty I omit his name, the one who has declared that Juan Ramón Jiménez is a bore, and that he prefers Chiquito de la Calzada.
Mario Vargas Llosa, I dedicate my silence to him (Alfaguara). The protagonist of the novel is a Creole music scholar who is so fascinated by listening to Lalo Molfino that he decides to go meet him. Thus begins the itinerant character so frequent in Vargas Llosa's narrative, and his return to his native Miraflores, but here, unlike in Los Puppies, full of garbage and rats. In the vindication of the Creole waltz he sees the expression of Peruvian nationality. The writer announces his silence as a novelist, whom fortunately we do not believe.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, The Admunsen Papers (edition by Jesús Colmeiro, Navona). Unpublished novel written in the sixties, so its publication would have been totally impossible, and now happily recovered. Here we see how the university (that of Joan Petit, Martín de Riquer, Francesc Gomà or the parodied communist fanatic philosopher Manuel Sacristán) and his years in prison left a profound mark on him. His experience as a chronicler has been especially beneficial.
Álvaro Pombo, Santander, 1936 (Anagram). Pombo abandons here one of his most frequent themes, homosexuality, and his prose is no longer loaded with the lyrical intensity that brought him closer to poetry. An autobiographical novel set in his native Santander, its protagonists are the members of the rancid Pombo dynasty. The conflict arises when one of its members joins Falange, which for him “is not a party, it is a spiritual movement.” The dialectic that is generated is one of the most attractive aspects of the novel.
Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Castle of fire (Seix Barral). The Aragonese narrator did not directly experience the first post-war years, but he lives them intensely, as we do, through his writing, the result of rigorous documentation and suggestive prose loaded with contained emotion and a lively gallery of characters. He fits perfectly into a tradition that goes from Pérez Galdós to Almudena Grandes, and it is confirmed here that the joyful peace did not come with the end of the Civil War. It has been celebrated as one of the great novelties of the year.
Antonio Soler, I who was a dog (Galaxia Gutenberg). We are facing a case of gender violence, with the peculiarity that, written in the form of a diary, it is told by the narrator himself, who offers us a distorted reading that the reader is obliged to unmask. Sex has a dominant presence, presented in an attractive way, but we soon discover that he is a jealous, possessive person, a voyeur who experiences everything obsessively, hence the frequent recurring motifs. The descriptions of the characters' physiques are fun.
Cristina Fernández Cubas, El columpio (Firmament). This recovery of El columpio, a magnificent short novel that shares all the virtues of his masterful stories, is very timely. The action here takes place not in Arenys, but in the mysterious Tower House. Before arriving at this closed and oppressive space, the narrator observes something strange: the letter she wrote announcing her arrival, which never reached the hands of her uncles. Her arrival is a surprise and her stay is something disturbing, full of secrets.
Juan José Millás, Only smoke (Alfaguara). For Juan José Millás, the perception of the daily life that we live as normal reveals the most disconcerting aspects. Here we discover it through Carlos's reading of a notebook written by his father that tells us about his life and his relationship with a neighbor: the house next door, so present in everything. his narrative.
Laura Fernández, Ladies, Gentlemen and Planets (Random House). A series of stories marked by imagination taken to its limits and fueled by science fiction and the most radical North American narrative, with the presence of aliens, dinosaurs and animated beings that talk tirelessly. One of the most powerful and unusual proposals in our narrative, a real challenge to the reader's mind.
Basilio Baltasar, The Apocalypse according to Saint Goliath (KRK). We must point out here the absolute originality and audacity of a writing that happily does not belong to any generation and that in its originality brings us closer to the mythological, despite the fact that we move in the present. That is to say, the timeless and the temporal come together, with the threatening presence of old age. To highlight Claudia's visit to a museum.
Miguel Ángel Hernández, Anoxia (Anagrama). Anoxia is the loss of brain oxygenation. One of the themes of the novel is taking photographs of the dead. It is about photographing the dying person. Hernández has documented this tradition and we witness life at the moment of death. At the same time there are the Murcia floods in 2019 and Dolores captures the destruction and desolation with a daguerreotype. An absorbing novel that deserves all praise.
Elisa Victoria, Otaberra (Blackie Books). Here there is the complete opposite of the idealization of a place. A novel in which there is no room for nostalgia. We are anchored in the present thanks to the recovery of many moments from the past, to create, thanks to the dramatic structure, simultaneity. The narrator lives in constant tension without us knowing exactly what it is due to, and the reader also lives in constant tension.
Mariana Travacio, You will see me fall (The Outskirts). An elaborate and intelligent structure in a series of stories set in “this cursed country” – the narrator's Argentina – with the presence of a river that leads nowhere, and the horrible drizzle that besieges us. Stories dominated by loneliness, old age and death.
