On one occasion, I heard the journalist Enric Juliana say that Spain produces more politics than it can consume. Something similar happens with the lists of the best of the year that, like the Christmas announcements, each time appear first.
Actually, I have nothing once morest lists. What’s more, making them seems like a fun way to entertain yourself; even a survival method (and if not ask the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity”). What doesn’t convince me is its aspiration to be a throwaway canon; to be a show that meets all tastes. The first is not true; the second, impossible. Reality tends to be less binding.
It is not that the titles that appear in the different lists are not books to consider. That is not the problem. The drawback, in my opinion, is that suffrage is not a good method, since suffrage has something to call those specialized readers who are critics to attest to the diversity and richness of the literary panorama. Rather, what those lists look like is the table or shelf of a bookstore offering their delicacies (there is nothing wrong with this) that want to pass themselves off as the universal common. It is the disadvantage of seeing the reader as a customer when the reader himself does not exist. There are readers in the plural: individual and capricious who sometimes coincide around a shared taste. The newspaper with which I collaborate has asked me to choose my favorite narrative of the year in Spanish, although in honor of the truth one is already making that list over the weeks, and if I have highlighted the last, to give three examples, by Mariano Peyrou, Pilar Adón or Jon Bilbao, it will be that I consider them worthy of being on any podium, as is evident.
Every relationship has its cracks and the biggest gap of mine is that the two authors have won the “Tigre Juan” award.
But I am not going to evade my responsibility and I will say which narrative books in Spanish I would highlight of this 2021 that is saying goodbye. I know that I will disappoint the supporters of the more the merrier, but the truth is that I would only dare to cite those texts that have disturbed me (I consider the ability to disturb a literary virtue) and those have really been two: “Cherries in the hideout . Journalistic texts 2011-2020 ”by Tomás Sánchez Santiago (Eolas editions) and“ Los domingos ”by Guillem Martínez (Editorial Anagrama). Both are two books that emerge from the mixed and fruitful terrain that fertilizes the crossroads between journalism and literature. That of the Zamorano Sánchez Santiago arises from his collaborations with the newspaper El Norte de Castilla and that of the Catalan Martínez from the weekly columns with the same name published in the digital magazine Contexto.
The writing of the two is impregnated with calm and meticulousness; of discreet poetry and modest discrepancy. Santiago himself, in a text regarding neighborhood stores, defines like no one else the tone and purpose of the titles chosen: that nobody seems to estimate for being cheap, priceless flight. Of the near ”.
I am grateful that I did not look great and that my amendment to the totality had not fallen into an exquisite, very boutade position that said: I with rereading “The Radetzky March” by Joseph Roth and “The Teacher and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov I already have enough (although either of these two works, or both, would satisfy a reader’s taste)
Every list, even one as scarce as mine, has its cracks and the biggest gap in mine is that both authors have been winners of the “Juan Tiger Award” of which I have been a jury until this year. Of course it is not by chance. But contrary to popular belief, it is not the reader who justifies the book, but exactly the other way around.
Anyway, maybe I am a dinosaur in full glaciation, but until I freeze completely, and if possible, I plan to continue reading and commenting on what I read.
Cherries in the stash
Thomas Sanchez Santiago
Eolas Ediciones, 272 pages
18 euros
Sundays
Guillem Martínez
Anagram, 278 pages,
18,90 euros
.
