Professor of Spanish Literature, columnist, researcher, and literary and bullfighting critic, Andrés Amorós (Valencia, 1941) has to his credit countless books and articles in his specialty and on bullfighting, such as ‘The intellectual novel of Ramón Pérez de Ayala ‘, ‘The literary work of Don Juan Valera’; ‘Vulgar philosophy’ – around proverbs -, and ‘The art of bullfighting’, among many others. But, equally, Amorós has developed a successful novelistic-narrative facet, displayed in titles such as ‘The Couples Game’ and ‘The New Life of Alonso Quesada’. Now he gives us a delicious book, made up of twenty-seven stories, in which he creates as many epics of various characters. STORIES ‘Portraits’ Author Andrés Amorós Editorial Fórcola Year 2024 Pages 200 Price 18.50 euros 4We meet them through moments in their lives, in which they come into contact with the narrator in the first person, and through significant, curious and juicy anecdotes, like that of a sixty-year-old painter who has fallen in love like a child with a young student and asks her for literature on love to understand what is happening to him; a writer and his mystical experience; the singularities of ‘a Basque skull’…The resource of the anecdote, as Baroja pointed out, reveals to us perhaps better than any other, the idiosyncrasy of the character. In Amorós’ proposal, these are figures from worlds that, as he himself confesses in the preface, are those with which he is most familiar: writers, artists, bullfighters, teachers… We are invited to discover who each one is. Of those portrayed, well, except for three, they are not named. Accept the challenge And we are invited to the game of discovering who each of the portrayed is, since they are not named, except in three cases: the musician Carmelo Bernaol a, the set designer Sigfrido Burmann and the legendary bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, mourned by Federico García Lorca, in an exciting and emotional poem. Accept the challenge. All the characters are real, and the stories that are told to us are true, although seasoned with fiction, since, under Cervantes’ protection, we are reminded that “the lie is better the truer it seems.” Be that as it may, we are very successfully immersed in that ‘truth of lies’ – Mario Vargas Llosa explained well – which is literature. Enjoy these ironic, compassionate… and always intelligent ‘Portraits’, which will make you smile while still provoking reflection. A quote from Shakespeare leads the play: “They are things of men and women. Nothing else”. And nothing less.
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