Eight young and talented Spanish writers accepted the challenge of writing a Christmas story with the sole premise that will move away from the clichés: the result is A Christmas Like This (Tusquets Editores), an anthology of “strange” stories presented this Wednesday in which there is neither snow nor happiness abounds.
Julia Viejo, Marta Jiménez Serrano, Inés Martín Rodrigo, Munir Hachemi, Paco Cerdà, Cristina Araújo Gámir, Andrea González Plata and Daniel Ruiz received this commission last spring from fellow writer Elisa Ferrer, who has edited a work far from the hackneyed and cloying imaginary usual.
“In the proposal there was no limitation, the only premise was to count a Christmas outside of clichéssomething that for me was a Christmas gift,” said Inés Martín Rodrigo at a press conference, who claims that when reading the book she had “the whole time I had the feeling that those were the real Christmases, everyone felt something inconvenient past on December 25”.
In reality, there are common threads that are repeated in the stories: in almost all of them food appears, by excess or by default, as a “backbone element” and is sought “tell what really happens underneath all those giftsall those family gatherings and all those visits to El Corte Inglés”, a commercial establishment that also appears on more than one occasion, they have explained.
Aside from more bitter or tragicomic situations, such as daughters fleeing from their mothers (Home and decorationby Cristina Araújo Gámir) or epistolary relations between a prisoner and his beloved (The miracle of the almondsJulia Viejo), Paco Cerdà contributes in a peaceful night a magical and Christmas element, based on the historical fact of one-day ceasefire in the trenches of World War I to be able to celebrate Christmas.
The authors—Inés Martín Rodrigo, Julia Viejo, Andrea Fernández Plata, Marta Jiménez Serrano and Daniel Ruiz were present this Wednesday—have acknowledged that in some way this book has amused them and reconciled with the literary idea of Christmas, which otherwise they almost certainly would not have looked at.
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