Reading Rubén Lardín (Barcelona, 1972) is like looking at several things (very good things, of course) at the same time. The unexpected return of the group La Buena Vida, a video of the actress Drew Barrymore celebrating the rain on her social networks, how someone cuts Serrano ham with a knife and does it masterfully. The silence. The mythical photograph of Ignacio Aldecoa with his eyebrows out in the open, a vigorous aside from Miguel Espinosa of The ugly bourgeoisie.
The occasions, Lardín’s latest book, magnificently edited, by the way, by the Riojan Fulgencio Pimentel (as well as The atomic hour, (2017) is a compendium of human disorders that, thank God, have multiple remedies. And, in case there are none (because sometimes there aren’t), the author generously invents them and entertains the reader while waiting for the end, like everyone else. Above all, and most importantly, Rubén Lardín doesn’t burden the reader with the inconveniences of some tear-jerking first persons, but rather gifts you with the presence of someone who, despite being made of paper, could be your friend.
Lardín has time in his writing to love and to be bored, that is, to live and to do so with free will, ha, ha, honesty. His style, impeccable (say it!), is not torrential or baroque, but he ends up condensing in his writing the great paradigms that we face, the challenges, the uncertainty to make from his notebooks a critique of mundanity and a praise of the everyday. His prose is accompanied by hits cinematographic, the work of some comic artists and the lack of influences, beyond the climate of the city through which he walks.
If you expect guts when talking about yourself and how you have decided to lead your life, close this book and travel to the Spanish 16th century, which is where these picaresque muds come from. Lardín enjoys the written sobriety of a peacock from the Palacio de la Granja de San Ildefonso, which only an urgent respect for readers provides. The little Barcelonan does not laugh at you, he laughs with you in his reflections on modernity and civilization in narrative form, but without falling into navel-gazing, that is, frugal wanderings on very intimate matters. Because writing is what happens when you have endless things to do.
It is difficult to say that your book (and more than one book written, as indicated, in notebooks) is about this or that. That a guy moves from Barcelona to Madrid and visits Paris. That a man regularly meets friends who may or may not exist. That a citizen hides behind the class struggle to start a new monotheistic religion: that of confessing to be a prisoner of his time. That the guy you are talking about fucks descriptively and affectionately and writes beautiful love poems. From this anti-petty bourgeois inventory – what a long word – everything is accepted or nothing is accepted. Either you buy the guy with his moods or you leave him resting in the showcase of civilization.
The occasions it’s a all-you-can-eat of the world’s chatter less for the sake of it, and one knows that one is in front of a good book because it says the magic words, a vasodilatory spell: “Living with oneself is also living in society.” The author is the magician and a sentimentalist.
If you don’t know Rubén Lardín, I recommend him to you. If you already knew Rubén Lardín, let’s say that you recommended him to me and then I recommended him to you again because I forgot. I wish I hadn’t read Rubén Lardín so I could read Rubén Lardín.
The occasions
Ruben Lardin
Fulgencio Pimentel, 2024
284 pages, 21.85 euros
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