The terrible daily life under the Israeli occupation, the adventures of the Count of Villamediana, the mantras against immigration and other books of the week

Our (excellent) book of the week addresses a specific drama, the tragedy that occurred on February 16, 2012, for a limited number of families, the accident on a road near Jerusalem of a bus that was taking some children on an excursion. But at the same time it explains with crystal clear lucidity the collective drama of the occupation that Israel began in 1967 after its victory in the Six-Day War in the territories of Palestine. Six children and a teacher died in that accident, and A day in the life of Abed Salama, by Nathan Thrall, addresses the incongruous bureaucratic journey that Abed Salama, the grieving father of one of those deceased children, begins to find out what happened, whether his son was alive or dead, or even how he could recover his body. Pulitzer Prize winner, Nathan Thrall’s is a great book of journalism about the Palestinian territories, as it crudely describes the terrible regime imposed by Israel in Palestine, which affects the daily lives of its inhabitants and is even destroying Israeli society itself. , as Guillermo Altares explains in his review of the book.

Another featured book of the week is The myths of immigration. 22 false mantras on the issue that divides us most, in which Hein de Haas dismantles those preconceived ideas that prevail, especially in Western countries as the principles of the extreme right advance, about the phenomena of migration. The first of these myths is that immigration is out of control. No: since the middle of the 20th century it has been at 3% of the population, what happens is that before it was the Europeans who moved and now they are the ones who receive the immigrants. Another mantra: the main driver of international migration is inequality and poverty; Well, neither: they are the jobs available in the host countries.

The experts of Babelia They have also reviewed other interesting titles, such as Zeal, the admirable third novel by Sabina Urraca, which shows that books can still tell some lives without betraying them; Gift of insolence, in which Carlos Aganzo narrates the dissolute life of Juan de Tassis, count of Villamediana, in the Spain of Cervantes, Lope, Góngora and Quevedo; Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel recently awarded the Booker International Prize; Revolutionary Spring, in which Christopher Clark analyzes the political upheaval of 1848-1949 as “the only truly European revolution there has ever been”; Three minutes. About the mystery of Stalin’s call to Pasternak, by Ismaíl Kadaré, who analyzes the multiple versions told about the brief telephone call that the communist dictator made in June 1934 to the 1958 Nobel Prize and author of Doctor Zhivago; and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The artist who gave shape to the avant-garde, by Joana Masó and Éric Fassin, an essay about the German artist that raises the question of whether The fountainby Marcel Duchamp, a seminal work of the avant-garde, was actually a collective construction.

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