After reading the narrative debut of this author born in Tarragona in 1968, one stays spinning around his copy of You won’t rob like those cats in the zoo cages, waiting for food, tilting if we -if there were no bars- we would be their food.
It is the first and -hopefully one is deceived- THE BOOK of its author. There will be others -your editorial and I hope so- but they will be something else. Inevitably. This is a wild and honest book that does not try to make a piece of literature neither of the savagery nor of the honesty of the one who narrates as he remembers or occurs to him. The narrator in this autobiography boycotts himself on each page to prevent lies from having the rank of literary truth. Also avoid the biases of authority and talent, fatuity and epic of the writers when they make trauma an object and a cause, a story and a clean and beautiful suit. Girós could do it but he denies it all the time. The subtitles of the film avoid the usual story told as always to explain in their own way, divisive, demystified, remembered and plundered, the ugly distance with which we look at ourselves in the mirror until we find the grimace we like.
This novel sends to the Esplai de la Parroquia the majority of writers who make their testimony -real, invented, exaggerated, sought after, rigged- a brass ring that they sell as gold. The reconstruction of childhood, of the lives of his parents, of those wonderful horrible years of the voice that explains, novels, gestures, tries, gets lost and finds, banal, painful and, if necessary, profound, makes this novel a rare bird in the field of the autobiographical, the essay, the fictional and therapy without a psychiatrist. This book is outrageous. If books like this can still be written, edited, published, sold and bought, then there is still hope for despair, and please forgive this awkward ending, but I am not Josep Girós.
The Sevillian is probably the best kept secret of the noir genre. His books -especially the last ones- draw lines between the fantastic, the black and the historical and create a personal, recognizable and hypnotic territory. Biedma transports us to the beginning of the civil war by the hand of Crisanta, a house brand character, in a plot of robberies, fortune telling, haste and bad premonitions.
Osborne, his books, his photos and his attitude, have such a classic aroma that one always believes that he went to school with Ian Fleming. Each book of his is an artifact that he knows where it is going and in which curves to turn to give us the typical and wonderful afternoon of “don’t bother me I’m reading today”. Also, since the guy is a bad ass, “Damn Luck” will take us to Macao, a mecca of money and vice where real players are given what they like best, losing.
Osborne, his books, his photos and his attitude, have such a classic aroma that one always believes that he went to school with Ian Fleming. Each book of his is an artifact that he knows where it is going and in which curves to turn to give us the typical and wonderful afternoon of “don’t bother me I’m reading today”. Also, since the guy is a bad ass, Damn Luck will take us to Macao, a mecca of money and vice where real players are given what they like best, losing.
