Baudelaire said that “this life is like a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. “This one would like to suffer by the stove and this other thinks he would improve in front of the window.” The phrase, which is an accurate diagnosis of eternal human dissatisfaction, made even more acute in the modern era with the deceptive range of its infinite options, serves very well to describe the stories that make up ‘A Better Place’, the writer’s new book Pedro Ugarte from Bilbao (1963). The uniformity of this destiny is reinforced here with two reiterations that are like the main beams of the whole: the name of the protagonist of the stories, which is invariably Jorge (in fact, that is the name of the protagonist of the four books of stories by Ugarte that have read), and the express appearance in ten of the twelve texts of the phrase that serves as title and leitmotif: a better place. STORIES ‘A better place’ Author Pedro Ugarte Editorial Páginas de Espuma Year 2024 Pages 208 Price 17 euros 4From this point of view, the characters occupy their space in a palette that only seems to contain a gray scale. Discreet nuances in that barren picture of life that could also be called ‘lost illusions’. Although the metaphor that the author has chosen is that of the train and the journey. The twelve stories are distributed in four sections that are, in turn, four stops on a journey where the landscape is less interesting than the interior abysses of its travelers: Station of Memory, Station of Solitude, Station of Lies and Stories of the last station.Bundle of customsIn this tour, territories and situations familiar to Ugarte’s readers will appear: the nightmarish world of corporate bureaucracy (“that pyramid of fear and frustration”); the longing, unbridgeable distance of his male characters from the feminine (“Elegy on the subway, every morning, a woman to fall in love with”); the burden of customs and ties from the past (“The worst thing about memory is when the present contradicts it. You can remember the past, but not insist on it”); the comedy of false happiness and social advancement in couple life (“Eugenia and I didn’t play tennis well, I’m not even sure we liked doing it, but walking and running bored us and what we were clear about was that we had to practice some sport”), among other topics through which he walks with his usual mastery. With ‘A better place’ Pedro Ugarte confirms that he is one of the best storytellers in our language. And for several years now, without making concessions with the moral or advertising imperatives so at hand today. On the contrary, he insists on a militant pessimism, hopeful through stubbornness, heroic in his perseverance. In the end, this is the life we have been given, their stories seem to tell us. We must live it and learn to love it and accept it as it is. And besides, you never know what awaits us at the next stop.
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