“Two things happen,” says essayist and literary critic Nadal Suau in his review of Scorpions, by Sara Barquinero: “the first, that I believe in the book until I applaud. The second, whether or not it convinces each one (the consensus, what a suspicious destiny for a work), its solidity is impossible to ignore.” This is how forceful the expert is with the new work of the writer from Zaragoza, a billet of 800 pages where the least thing is its thickness and the most important thing is its literary quality. A novel of novels destined for “inevitable success.”
Another notable book is Under dry ground, the recent Nadal Prize written by César Pérez Gellida. It is a crime novel, and therefore what better way to analyze it than our expert in the genre, Juan Carlos Galindo, who finds in this narrative large doses of thriller historical setting and rural noir, with a finale of action and violence well narrated, western style. And with a character that grows throughout its pages, love. “A novel ending in the best sense of the word,” Galindo concludes. For its part, Pollak's arm, by Hans von Trotha, tells the story of Ludwig Pollak, a renowned antiquarian and art advisor, best known for being the person who found, and gave to the Vatican Museums, the lost arm of the famous sculptural group of the Laocoon. A good narrative with an already known ending: Pollak was murdered in Auschwitz, like so many thousands of Roman Jews.
Other books reviewed this week are The Bill Gates problemby Tim Schwab, which attacks the American magnate and philanthropist, raising doubts about the good intentions of his charitable acts, aimed, according to the author, at obtaining even more power; The underbelly of the heartby Eugenio Fuentes, an essay on the crime novel that, according to the writer Leonardo Padura, author of our review, has been erasing the limits that separated it from other genres in a permanent transfer of themes and stylemes; A life confined to the cinema or the failure of Jean Eustacheby Barthélemy Amengual, which analyzes the life and work of the director of emblematic works such as Zero number (1971) or The mom and the whore (1973); and Not one, not big, not free, the interesting analysis of Francoism carried out from Grenoble by Nicolás Sesma, whose most important thesis is that that dark period in the recent history of Spain was only possible because it did not depend on a single man and was rather a regime, like all dictatorships, not of electors but of selectors; “people whom you select to be part of the power, to whom you have to offer a sufficient part of the pie and to whom you have to control so that they do not threaten you.”
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