According to the RAE, a constellation is a set of stars that, through imaginary lines, form a drawing that evokes a certain figure. And there are books that are more constellation than book, like this one, Soap and water. Marta D. Riezu’s unclassifiable volume builds a treatise on what seduces us based on a fragmented succession of opinions, quotes, passages and curiosities.
If Riezu’s book is unclassifiable, the diaries respond to each author’s own style, because where existence reigns with disorders and divisions, the diary imposes unity. Milena Busquets (the fair words), Manuel Rico (full diaries), Julio José Ordovás (The sentimental pedestrian) and Joseph Julius Pearl (Miquelrius’s notebooks) resort to gender to become inventors of their problems, their interests, their sensitivities.
The material and symbolic awareness of the moment in 2019 when Mercè Ibarz’s brother uproots the fruit trees in the land of Zaidín (Huesca) that his family had cultivated generation after generation reactivates the fertility of a farmer of words who returns, once again, to the origin to think about her world and about herself. The result: Triptych of the earth.
Of other losses he speaks twenty years of sunshineof Eve Cruz, which narrates two decades in the life of its protagonist and describes the consequences of a scientific method that allows short- and long-term memory to be voluntarily erased, plus the emotions associated with memories that have already been deactivated. “You will lose other things along the way. But I think it will compensate you”, her doctor tells Sol. On the contrary, the one she does not want to forget is the Argentine writer Cecilia Szperling, who writes in The dream projecting machine an “autobiographical fable” that unravels his own return to childhood in nine chapters.
Also autobiographical, but with an adventurous touch, it is The escape from Siberia in a reindeer sleigh, in which Leon Trotsky narrates the flight after his second deportation to Siberia. A story in which he describes the desolation of the people in a country in decomposition under the repression of tsarism.
For their part, Peter Gordon, editor of the Asian Review of Books, and Juan José Morales, former president of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, address in the essay Silver and the Pacific the phenomenon that could be called the first globalization or early globalization, a consequence of the transoceanic relations between Asia and Latin America between the 16th and 19th centuries. And without abandoning the conquest of the oceans, Isabel Soler tackles, with a fast-paced, ironic and well-documented style, the preparations of Ferdinand Magellan in his attempt to circumnavigate the globe for the first time, as well as the adventures experienced during the voyage of the stateless Portuguese navigator.
Marta D. Riezu’s unclassifiable book builds a treatise on what seduces us based on a fragmented reality of genius and curiosities. Review by Laura Ferrero.
The author seems comfortably installed in the minimalist interpretation that she makes of the diary genre and it works like a glove for her. Review by Anna Caballé.
The axis of Rico’s newspapers is Madrid and the whirlwind of a city that in the eighties lived in full socio-cultural and political transformation. Review by Anna Caballé.
The book is written with the author’s vocation to organize his civic memory around the front and back of the same reality: the city and the biography. Review by Anna Caballé.
We are facing a rather indefinable literary exercise, between the punctual annotation typical of a diary, the unconnected evocation of personal memory and the references to an intellectual life that has allowed its author to establish relationships with prominent personalities. Review by Anna Caballé.
Mercè Ibarz addresses in Triptych of the Earth the civilizational metamorphosis that condemns the agricultural way of life, the landscape and the identity of rural areas of Catalonia. Review by Jordi Amat.
Eva Cruz links several narrative threads to address two decades in the life of its protagonist and how science investigates to eliminate bad memories and their associated feelings. Review by Ana Rodríguez Fischer.
The book by Argentine Cecilia Szperling is a search with autobiographical notes with which, from adulthood, she conjures up the memories and anxieties of childhood. Review by Raquel Garzón.
Leon Trotsky’s autobiographical book narrates the flight after his second deportation to Siberia in 1907, in a country in decomposition under the repression of tsarism. Review of Cesar Rendueles.
This essay focuses on the transoceanic relations between Asia and Latin America between the 16th and 19th centuries, which laid the foundations for the first universal currency. Criticism of Carlos Martínez Shaw.
Isabel Soler narrates with a fast-paced, ironic and well-documented style the preparations and adventures of Magellan’s first trip around the world. Review of Bernat Castany Prado.
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