Irene Vallejo in Infinity in a Junco connects us with the ancient world in an affordable way. It tells us about the origin of paper and how once it became a book it has remained, because it is like spoons and wheels, once invented nothing better can be done, says this erudite and Aragonese writer. Irene tried to narrate like Agatha Christie in One Thousand and One Nights and she succeeded since her work takes us from one story to another and so on ad infinitum. It is an essay devoid of the formal language of the academy and therefore its reading is easy and exquisite.
Reading it is like getting on a wagon that moves back and forth on the rails of time. If we could recover the traces of his walk, we would make a gigantic list of analogies between the present and the past by smelling the effluvia left by the Egyptian reed transformed into papyrus. We would also have news of the women who wrote in ancient times and we would carefully approach the written word: the origin of the alphabet, the meaning of each of its letters, the first scribes and libraries.
It would be possible to know that Alexander the Great wanted to be like Odysseus and that is why he read Homer. Approaching Vallejo is learning and enjoying neat and beautiful prose. The topics he addresses are multiple, but the central one, I repeat, is the history of books. Those objects adored by some, are the best testimony of what we were and what we are. Books are the fable and the truth of human knowledge because they replaced memory and thus orality was printed; her appearance, she declares excitedly, marked the beginning of the story thanks to the fact that “Words found shelter in the marrow of an aquatic plant” When writing El Infinito en un reed she never imagined the success it would have, it began as her doctoral thesis and today the book has been translated into thirty languages and has more than eleven editions.
To finish, I will try to explain with an example what I mean when I say that Vallejo comes and goes in time: The Library of Alexandria, which we owe to Alexander the Great and his conquests, is a character that appears like the morning breeze throughout the text, but his disquisitions become sharper and coarser when he talks about Homer, taking him out of his bag of knowledge places him in the center of the room. He says that he is a man without a biography. The truth is that no one knows exactly when he lived. But those who read then did so in the Iliad and the Odyssey, he insists.
But it doesn’t matter that he is reflecting on this character, creator of legendary legends, because, suddenly, he goes back to rummaging in his bag, takes out a magic wand, and without realizing it, it leads us to another current topic where he also has a lot to say. He is a prodigy of a woman fitting words. It makes equivalences erasing the limits of time because it takes the Western culture by the hand of Greece and then returns to the Rosseta Stone, to Euripides, Sophocles or the poetess Sappho, and again, places you in a cinema watching a contemporary film, and once again, he returns to 324 BC with Alexander the Great. This feat could only be achieved by a woman whose father read The Iliad and The Odyssey to her as a child and who loved literature because the bullying she suffered from it made her take refuge in it.
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