Exactly 30 years after Carlos Perellón and Pedro Zarraluki shared the podium and award, the Herralde Novel Award has once again used ex aequo to recognize not the winner and finalist, but two winners: the Chilean Cynthia Rimsky and the Barcelonan Xita Rubert. Two hemispheres and two different generations brought together thanks to ‘Clara y confusing’ and ‘The Facts of Key Biscayne’, novels with which Rimsky and Rubert inscribe their names in the list of prizes awarded annually by the Anagrama publishing house and whose 42nd edition has been seen altered by the rain storm that hit Barcelona this Monday.
‘The events of Key Biscayne’, the second novel by Xita Rubert (Barcelona, 1996) after ‘My days with the Kopps’ is, at the same time, “a mystery novel and a book about the ambivalences of affection and memory.” A “tender, hilarious and disturbing” narrative that follows the steps of a girl in transition to adulthood and fascinated by her father in Key Biscayne, one the island inhabited by “girls who don’t seem to be, lizards, tycoons, celebrities, gangsters and very unconventional families.”
“A rarefied story of adolescent desires processed by an adult mind,” according to Gonzalo Pontón Gijón, member of a jury completed by Aldo García, Gonzalo Pontón Gijón, Marta Sanz, Juan Pablo Villalobos and the editor Silvia Sesé. «A sticky novel in many ways: because of the heat of a Florida populated by eccentric characters, both endearing and exasperating; for the humid atmosphere in which the protagonist, a teenager fascinated with her father, must learn to breathe,” adds Villalobos.
Of ‘Clear and confusing’, novel by Cynthia Rimsky (Santiago de Chile, 1962), the jury highlighted that it is “an avant-garde romantic comedy” that delves into the mystery and promise that accompany love and art. «Art and falling in love as experiences that synthesize maximum clarity and maximum confusion. Beauty, intelligence and humor”, in the words of Marta Sanz.
In the novel, a plumber falls in love with an artist named Clara and embarks on a story “of love and dependence with torturous limits.” «Straight between the profession of love and the love of the profession, ‘Clara y confusing’ sets up a world of provinces as extravagant as the pipes that its protagonist takes care of, faithful and long-suffering in love with a conceptual artist who is a heroine. of denial, and no less faithful member of a professional union full of conspirators and cynical philosophers,” summarized, also from the jury, Pontón Gijón.
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