Various ideasby César Aira (Blatt & Ríos). Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen: after a month without editorial news, September finally arrives with its annual go home (forgive me for writing this word like that, but I can’t be bothered to look for where the accent is in the original French). A go home which is very loaded with autofiction —hello?; Will this unhealthy obsession with reality expire at some point? – but in which we happily find a new book by the prolific César Aira. Because? Mainly because their proposals are always disconcerting and this was not going to be an exception: it is published by an Argentinian publisher I had never heard of (it seems that the bad relations between Milei and Sánchez still allow the gauchos to operate in our country normally), is entitled Various ideas while in reality it is a continuation of his Pursuit of various ideas (yes, you read that right and isn’t it great?) and there you will find literary reflections of a very marked originality, like this one: “Writing badly can be more rewarding for the reader because it forces him to decipher” what the author meant – which I allow myself to transcribe here.
Baitby Eugenia Ladra (Transit). You should know that I am coming back refined after the summer and I am not going to joke about the fact that this author’s last name is “ladra” and that she titled her novel after the bait used to attract an animal. On the contrary, I am going straight into the review of this powerful debut work, so powerful that in fact it begins with the protagonist killing a dog in its first pages. Because what better way to start a novel – or, let’s hurry up, any Sunday in September – than by killing a dog? Few things come to mind, and at least that is how the Uruguayan author manages to draw the reader’s attention to a sordid and hallucinatory story in which being a woman in a shitty village will play a fundamental role.
kidby Gabriel Smith (trans. by Damián Tullio; Chai Editora). This promises to be one of the books of the season, if only because it has as its title the term that drove half the world crazy in 2024 (I think it has to do with the release of Charli xcx’s latest album or I don’t know what). The novel is about a boy who returns to his childhood home and discovers that both he and the house are rapidly deteriorating (yes, both: things are becoming very surreal) and, like almost all first novels, it is very good, with its dose of phantasmagoria, humor, sad meditation, etc. Just a doubt, since it is clear that the author titled it kid seeking to align with the spirit of the times and thus attract attention: what would have happened if I had published it another year, and not in 2024? Would you have titled it Brother-in-law released it in 2021? Gritting teeth yes in 2022? Wait, wait:PEC either Serve the pussy yes in 2023?
drowned memoriesby Jairo Marcos and Mª Ángeles Fernández (Pepitas de Calabaza). Do you know, dear readers, that in Spain there are more than five hundred villages submerged by the waters of the swamps? That their former inhabitants were forced into exile, while the Franco regime completely ignored any explanation of what it meant to abandon their way of life? Well, whether you know it or not, here you have this essential literary investigation into the testimonies of those people whose towns were flooded forever and who – it could not be otherwise – have kept a disastrous memory of the engineer then in charge in the service of the regime… Juan Benet! A fact that cannot fail to remind the pedantic defenders of the heavy and cumbersome prose of the author of — I choose this one because of the prosody of the sentence, not because I like it in the least — Saul vs Samuel.
Soliloquies of an Antby Guillermo López Lacomba (Espuela de Plata). The title doesn’t mislead because the book is about precisely that: the problems that arise in the life of an ant. Who could be interested in the life of an ant? For me, without going any further, if we assume that as a viewer and user of social networks I have to be interested in the lives of Daniel Sancho, Ben Affleck and Jennifer López, the Gallagher brothers and the mother who gave birth to them, well, why wouldn’t I care about the vicissitudes of a whole Hymenoptera formicidae when in addition they give rise to an elegant and precise treatise on the always fascinating animal kingdom… Nothing, nothing: leave me happy with cockroaches like Kafka’s, rats like Sam Savage’s and ants like Lopez Lacomba’s, who with the As I get older, humans begin to give me more of the same.
cursed bag (Silverfish). Oh, and finally: if possible, it’s more important than buying books at the go home It’s about having a cool accessory to carry them from here to there, so I have no problem being the first literary critic to review the cloth bag – my daughter tells me they’re called tote bageither tote bags— from an editor: in this case one of the Silver Fish which, how pretty it is, is made of organic cotton and says in big letters that you are fucking a fish. What five-letter word is needed to complete the sentence, you may ask? It would be ugly for me to write it in this newspaper, so I will leave it to my readers to guess.
