Sinaloa, Mexico. There are stories that mark you and you decide to return to them repeatedly, or sometimes there are others that you did not expect to provoke such emotion in you, either because of their narrative, their theme or their style. Within the framework of the next International Book Day, which is celebrated on April 23 of each year, the names of Sinaloan writers, from other parts of our country or even from Argentina, coincide in this special doing one of the things that most interest them. like to write, this time not as creators, but to share some literary recommendations with readers. After all, to be a great writer, you must first be a great reader.
Among the recommendations we find everything from books that take us to 14th century Paris and stories that take us back to Russian literature, to stories that delve into violence and collective memory or whose main quality is a poetic narrative, opening up a possibility for readers that will allow them to travel in time and space, and thus perhaps find a new title to add to their favorites list.
Eduardo Cerdan
‘Cartridge. Stories of the struggle in northern Mexico’, by Nellie Campobello
I always come back to this book because I am fascinated by the artifice with which Campobello enunciates his stories from a childish look —not a voice. the narrator of Cartridge She is a girl, yes, but the artifice is that her way of “talking” can move —as in an act of conjuring, almost without us realizing it— towards an adult way of seeing the world. And then suddenly she returns to the veiled perspective of childhood. In this book —which mixes the chronicle, the short story, the poetic prose and the short novel—, Nellie Campobello it dignifies the anonymous bodies that participated in the Revolution, it humanizes them, and from the voices that boil behind a window it narrates the devastation and the collective trauma of a very violent era that is somewhat similar to ours. His enormous formal risks, his dazzling style, his sui generis game between tenderness and abjection make Cartridge one of the most extraordinary books of Mexican literature.
Sergio Perez Torres
‘Silk’, by Alessandro Baricco
Silk It is the book that I have bought the most and have given away again in my life. It is a short novel written in short chapters. Its greatness lies in the poetic, almost dreamy way in which it tells the story of Hervé Joncour, a French businessman, who, after the catastrophic shortage of silkworm eggs, is forced to undertake trips to Japan to obtain them. . The prose is fine and delicate like those little eggs. The ideal combination of adventure, romance, disaster, tension and culture shock. In addition to one of the most shocking outcomes of universal literature.
Jorge Diner
‘The Fourth Horseman’, by Verónica Murguía
the fourth horseman is a novel set in 14th century Paris, during the Black Death, one of the worst epidemics in human history. The author’s intimate and passionate knowledge of the Middle Ages infuses this work with enormous vividness and warmth, in which many voices share their intimate experience during a very rocky period worth remembering in the shadow of the recent pandemic. A doctor with a troubled identity and her young disciple are the central voices in this delicate and complex tapestry, which defies all editorial trends of our time. It is a concise, deep, timeless novel.
Mariel Iribe
‘Yesterday’, by Agota Kristof
Yesterday It is one of the books that have impacted me lately. It was a recommendation from my friend Francisco Goñi, a lifelong bookseller, and the truth is that reading it was a very intense experience. With this book I confirm my taste for short novels. Those kinds of stories that are told in a forceful way and that, due to brevity, retain that low blow that we find in the story. There we find characters who feel lost, misplaced, because they are in a country that is not theirs, but also because they are dark characters, with stories that disturb and invite them to continue reading. Especially the main character: Sandor Lester, son of a prostitute and a father who kept him away from his other family. A childhood experience leads him to become obsessed with a woman, to the point that this fantasy comes true and has a brutal and unexpected ending. Highly recommended. Intense and brief as it should be.
Gaston Garcia Marinozzi
‘Love and Exile’, by Isaac Bashevis Singer
love and exile It is a book that I read at that ungrateful moment of going through youth towards a certain maturity, when you wonder who you are, where you come from, where you are going. It’s not easy to answer that, and I don’t even know if they are ever answered, or one stops wondering and that’s it. love and exile He taught me many things, he confirmed the idea of migration as one of the essential aspects of being human. Mine is an absolute migrant vocation.
I’m lucky: I didn’t have to escape wars, disasters or social catastrophes. I only had to look into my heart to see how it beat at the seduction of the road. All this that I think and feel is in love and exile of Isaac Bashevis Singerhis autobiography in which he tells how he cut ties with his native Poland fleeing the War, and how he came to the United States knowing that he would be a foreigner for the rest of his life.
vincent alfonso
‘Labyrinth’, Eduardo Antonio Parra
Labyrinth, winner of the Fine Arts Award for Published Work in 2019, is an exciting reflection on the processes in which collective memory is built and on the always complex relationship between that memory and violence. It stands out in the first place because, despite the fact that it is built on a complex narrative scaffolding, it is an agile, fluid and very suspenseful read.
In the form of a canteen conversation, the novel addresses different temporal planes that intersect. At the center is a dark episode that occurred in the streets of El Edén, the hypothetical name of a town located in northeastern Mexico: one night two drug gangs confront each other with high-caliber weapons, and in their wake they destroy cars, houses, churches, and they even reduce the municipal presidency to ashes. Vine exhibits in this new fiction a deep mastery of what García Márquez called narrative carpentry, that is, the set of decisions that an author makes in the process of telling a story (who tells the story, at what moment does he tell it, to whom? tell you?).
Sergio Ceyca
‘The weight of living on earth’, David Toscana
david tuscany He is an author with a very defined style and theme. His reading is always unconventional, his themes always border on the delusional and are usually related to the quixotic aspect of wanting to live a life the way we want, and not how reality imposes it on us. In this book, his most recent, Nicolás is a public official bored with his work and his marriage.
It is then that he decides to live another life: that of a Russian like the one in the novels he likes to read so much: Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, The teacher and Margarita; and also like the Russian authors of the 19th and 20th century, whose work was so socially important that they were persecuted, and in many cases also murdered. For this he will drag his wife and a group of drunkards into a series of pantomime or games that, like Don Quixote, seek to destroy the daily life in which he lives. Always from the questions, will literature really save us? Are letters better than weapons?
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