◾️Fernanda Melchor: Hurricane Season (Literatura Random House, 2017)
A novel about the abject that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. The narrative tension is continuous and very high. A demonic story of death, violence, and marginalization, but above all, of the impossibility of redemption. I think it goes without saying that this is a Mexican story.
There is a town in the south where life is hell. None of the characters display any values. Dante says that there is nothing worse than the memory of happy times when one is suffering. These characters cannot even afford that luxury; they have no past: they have a walled-up tunnel. They all come from the mud and cannot escape it. There is no chance of survival where everything has an undertone of moral misery.
Starting with the death of La Bruja, an enigma in a small town, the author weaves a crochet of stories centered on some of those involved in the event, a chorus of voices in which the narrator never loses his footing. Each chapter is a chain of torment, thirty to fifty pages that can be read without blinking.
Most importantly, Melchor, although she lavishes on current topics in her interviews, has managed to tread carefully, and there is no moralizing or sentimentality anywhere. The writer Melchor knows that those who know do not give themselves away.
◾️Reina María Rodríguez: Dársenas (Ediciones Furtivas, Miami, 2023)
I really like these latest books by Reina María Rodríguez because I see leaks in them. They are not notebooks, but increasingly fugitive books, more persistent and zigzagging in their search for a landscape in which to recognize themselves, and that is why they are more honest and freer.
This is one of the most refined. It returns to an “environment” that wants to be familiar, but we know it is strange. The view of everyday events is not devoid of a certain uneasiness. The imagery of a lifetime is very powerful, and Havana, Santa Fe, and Galiano appear again in these poems, but now as if I were watching them pass by from a porthole or the glass rectangle of a train, perhaps one of those trolleys that run along Miracle Mile, from which one can spot her sitting in a café reading, writing, waiting.
There is a map to be reinvented, but it still does not fit well into a biography. Is Coral Gables already in these new notebooks? I have not yet discovered this, because it takes time to detach oneself from the landscape of a lifetime. Faced with this, the poet never capitulates, much less when she has inhabited the ruins. This vision has brought a certain gentleness that becomes softness in her poetic writing.
Descriptions of the senses and memory, but which do not necessarily deny or rectify their impact on the major event of her biography, which is to have witnessed disaster and to be able to say that she has survived. And that feeling of serene impassivity in the face of catastrophe is corroborated above all in one of the last texts, the longest, dedicated to the poet Juan Carlos Flores, who committed suicide in Havana in 2016.
◾️Daniel Pennac: Mi hermano (Literatura Random House, 2021)
I like to think of Bartleby as the opening of a modern path for literature, the assumption of a type of mystery that departs from that opened up by Poe. Melville took another route, delving into the loneliness of someone who refuses to participate, but does not break down. As Deleuze has seen, Poe does not lead to Musil, but Bartleby does.
Daniel Pennac rewrote the story as a monologue to reflect on the grief of his brother’s death. In short, alternating chapters, he recounts details of his relationship with his brother while inviting us to reread the text modified from Melville’s original. The most entertaining of these is the one in which several attendees at one of the performances speculate about what psychological or psychiatric condition afflicted Bartleby.
The book is one of those that allow us to live better ‘in’ the realms of imagination than in reality because the former will always be less impoverished. There is nothing to tell because, although every life is narratable, not every narrative invites us to read it.
