After sixteen years, since the publication of ‘The Wolberg Experiment’, Manuel Moyano (Córdoba, 1963), one of the best short story writers we have in our current literature and who had had his moment of glory with ‘Kafka’s Friend’ and ‘The Heavenly Gold’, in addition to the aforementioned book, returns to the genre that made him famous with this ‘The Judas Version’. ‘The version of Judas’ has ten stories that are very distant from each other in time, there are twenty-five years between the oldest and the most current but it is not noticeable, such is the conceptual and stylistic unity of the volume, and furthermore, so identifiable with his previous work, that studied prose clean of pedantry and false styling, also imbued with a fine humor and irony that is the mark of intelligent literature, which in these times is grateful to unexpected limits, so intelligent and so aware of the narrative powers for the sake of the structure of the story itself that he is capable of sacrificing the real to the credible, as his mentor Jorge Luis Borges, an assiduous practitioner of such sorcery, would applaud. STORIES ‘The version of Judas’ Author Manuel Moyano Editorial Talentura Year 2024 Pages 114 Price 15 euros 4 It must be said, however, that although Moyano jumped to the literary arena hand in hand with the story, maintains a relationship of equal excellence with the novel, ‘Yejorov’s Empire’; ‘The Devil’s Alibi’; ‘The black agenda’; ‘The kingdoms of Otrora’, as they attest, as do the travel books, his other obsession, where we come across ‘The American Journey’, ‘Cuadernos de Tierra’ or ‘The Interior Frontier’. In these new stories we also find, alas, Proust’s Magdalena, with that way of approaching the literary in which the Borgesian imprint was evident, but also that of Kafka, and this is not difficult to elucidate taking into account that some of his other books are titled with the name of the author of ‘The Castle’ and, more hidden, the attitude of Juan José Arreola who, like the Mexican, tends to secrecy out of pure shyness. Although came to the literary foreground hand in hand with the story, maintains a relationship of equal excellence with the novel The everyday, what appears to us as apparent custom, is gradually transformed in these pages into something fantastic that can acquire the features of the monstrous, even the impossible. Thus, that humor that already appears in the first paragraph of ‘This is how Mamadou died’: «In that war there was only one casualty. His name was Mamadou, he was black and he worked as an office worker at the German embassy in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. Or that metaphysical confusion in ‘The Red Scarf’, where a traveling salesman gets on a train with no destination and from which You can only escape by jumping from it while it is moving; ‘The Dreamed City’, on the contrary, has the qualities of the best of the classic story, that fervor of the myth in which a blind man and his son cross the pillars of Hercules and come across Atlantis and that remember the passion and at the same time , the acceptance of the wonderful that we find in ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ and that links with modernity through Lovecraft. Extraordinary stories, like the very Borgesian ‘The Book’ of which I can only give an account, as well as the rare quality of the rest. A beautiful book and a beautiful return.
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