The return of the past hurts, although time never stops turning and we are others when we meet it. Novels lubricate those turns and memory paints what happened in another color, that makes Monica Lavin in his book all about us published in 2019. When reading the meeting of four Mexican friends in Portugal we remember other similar stories and our own youth. They sat around a table to celebrate their sixtieth birthday, while they drank good wine and remembered the 1985 earthquake that shook Mexico City. Then their fresh eyes witnessed collapses of cement and souls, theirs thought they were covered in crusts hard enough for the memorable meeting to be only the reconstruction of a time lived, but surprises sneaked in between the grapes, the cheeses old and the presence of the dead, because the words made them come back to life and share their secrets. I don’t know if Lavín tells us a piece of his existence in this story, but I suspect that he does and that is why other stories come to mind. In any novel, the characters undergo structural transformations, in addition, there are many narratives that range from youth to adulthood. But that wide temporality does not allow us to classify it, but the way in which it is told does.
I begin by saying that there is nothing new in telling one’s life, what can captivate is how it is done. The literary exercises of JM Coetzee and Leo Tolstoy reveal the scars left in adults by childhood and youth. The former uses the sieve of time and dialogues to reinterpret the past, even though he writes in the present. The second resorts to the interior monologue. The two managed to make the steps of a human being, each one in his time, captivate when they become literature. Their faces tell us what is happening to them and that is precisely what the four protagonists of Todo sobre nosotros want to tell.
In Childhood, Youth and Misfortune by JM Coetzee, the author tells us about his life in South Africa in the 1950s. The protagonist wants to know who he is and that definition will be given by his environment and by the type of relationships he establishes with his family. He uses the present continuous, and sometimes the third person. He also introduces a lot of dialogue. These two voices sometimes make us think that someone else is telling the story, therein lies his magic; perhaps he reaches it because he let a lot of time pass between what he experienced and the moment he tells us about it.
In Childhood, adolescence, youth (1852, 1854 and 1857), Leo Tolstoy uses introspection to capture his memories and talk about him in 19th century Russia. His inner world gives us an account, once again, of his relations with the family and with the society in which he had to live.
In these three novels, the events become climaxes because they take place alongside youth, love, motherhood, depression and maternal-filial human relationships. But what is interesting is to discover to what extent the writer manages to show how these issues unfold within his characters, showing, I insist, his daily life. If there is more action than description, it will be the story itself that speaks and that is not easy to do. In short, Lavín, like the other two writers, endow their characters with a unique personality and makes us get to know them through the actions they undertake every day.
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