Lists are uncomfortable, but they are magnetizing: their heads and tails are the appearance of clarity that every classification proposes. The list of the best books of the year Babelia It comes home for Christmas as a tradition to close the cultural calendar and has the virtue and defect of consensual. Too many readers vote—every year we update the census—for the spreadsheet where the votes are added up for weeks not to end up showing something that could be defined as literary common sense.
The most voted books of the last decade have not stopped being read nor has the prestige of their authors been questioned, something that shows that, if they had that critical support, it was because of their quality. It is also disconcerting that the relevance of literature written by women and the rethinking of the cultural canon that has occurred in recent years have not had any impact on the choice of the best book. The lists also clarify in this sense: two out of ten is an anomaly from all points of view.
Perhaps the most significant thing about the list of best books of the last decade is the centrality that two writers who were young during the Transition have ended up acquiring in the culture of democracy: Javier Marías and Rafael Chirbes. They are two very different novelists who do not subscribe to the same aesthetic tradition, but both share a very high ambition for moral inquiry using impeccable prose as an instrument. Marías acquired prestige very early on and Chirbes, from the margins, approached the core of the canon. The unexpected thing, in the case of the Valencian writer, is that this definitive canonization has occurred through the critical success of his diaries.
2022
Diaries. At lost times 3 and 4
Rafael Chirbes
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The quality of the memoirs of Rafael Chirbes (1949-2015), demonstrated in its first volume, published in 2021, did not decline in the second installment, so it was no surprise that the author's diaries of On the shore once again took first place, ahead of excellent books by other prestigious authors. “The addiction generated by the author's intimacy does not depend on the connivance or harmony that the reader detects with his compulsive and bitter opinions, but on the very fact of witnessing the uncovering of the many phobias and apprehensions of a literary being also capable of enjoying of reality with the pen in hand, the physical pleasure of using it on paper and its narcotizing rustle,” he wrote in his notes for the special Babelia from a year ago Jordi Gracia, who also highlighted “the vertigo of immersion in an intimacy that is punished, insecure and so often exasperated.”
2021
Sara Mesa, winner in 2020, recognized that the “event of the year” had been the first installment of the memoirs of Rafael Chirbes, an author who had already risen to first place in 2013 with On the shore. “There have been many of us who have read them avidly and we have had many conversations about them,” he wrote in Babeliaan opinion shared by numerous lovers of literature in general and, in particular, of notes as personal as they are illuminating about the life and work of the author of Crematoriumdied in 2015 from lung cancer. The pessimism, loneliness and sordidness that these notebooks transmit are fueled by many tears, which make him sometimes appear ruthless towards others and almost always towards himself, Mesa noted.
2020
“Years ago, I began to build a story that I didn't quite know where it was taking me. It took me a long time and I made many mistakes, although I also made some successes that prevented me from giving up and throwing everything away. I picked up and put down the novel several times, in between I wrote other things,” said Sara Mesa (1976) herself when she was asked for a text about her illustrious number one 2020. And what there is no doubt is that all those efforts and uncertainties, perhaps common to many titles in the history of literature, were worth it: One Love It became a success that constituted “a pure joy for the reader” for maintaining “a very high narrative demand,” as Carlos Pardo noted in his review of the book.
2019
Luis Landero (1948) is a regular on all lists of the best books of the year whenever he has a new book. And in 2019 he achieved undeniable success with fine raina narrative that reveals countless blood secrets and that refers, as Ángel L. Prieto de Paula explained, to the literary debut of the Extremaduran writer, Late Age Games (1989). Our expert summed it up like this: “We are facing a masterful story that shows how precarious, and ultimately fictitious, all stability is. It is enough to dig into the past, any past, for abjection or madness to rear its ugly head.”
2018
“Ordesa It is the letter from the castaway that we have been waiting for for years. He arrived at the bookstores riding on a wave of foam that, when it retreated, left it on the shore, abandoned among a notable amount of the most varied remains. It did not stand out for its title or its cover, nor for the name of its author, who was not known outside certain circuits. But it was enough to read the first page to realize that that call for help came from the depths of ourselves.” This is how Juan José Millás explained in December 2018 the importance of a title that rose to first place among the preferences of our experts.
2017
Who died in September of last year, Javier Marías (1951-2022) has also been a regular at the annual literary summaries. Three years after publishing our best book of the year, This is how the bad beginsin 2014, he returned to deliver a round novel: Berta Isla, which also won the Critics' Prize for Castilian fiction in 2017. In his stories, as perceived by the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the characters move less and less, but more and more things happen. “And they are all interesting: they all challenge us, question us, shake us and move us. So in Berta Islathis wonderful novel that dialogues with Your face tomorrow, but also with “This is how the bad begins.”
2016
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