Because the world is still just as absurd, but also because of the centenary of his death, this 2024 we will read Kafka again -Páginas de Espuma publishes his complete Tales and Galaxia Gutenberg the second volume of his Letters- and also the letters that his friends sent to each other. contemporaries Stefan Zweig and Romain Rolland in the middle of the Great War, just before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire: From a world to another world (Cliff).
In fact, says the always provocative Yanis Varoufakis, we ourselves are already in another: in Tecnofeudalismo (Deusto) he says that capitalism is dead but the system that replaces it is no better. Although all worlds smell similar: Karl Schlögel will trace in The Scent of Empires (Cliff) how two iconic perfumes that symbolized antagonistic worlds, Chanel No. 5 and Moscow Red, were born from the same fragrance created to celebrate the Romanovs for two Frenchmen established in Moscow.
Another crossroads: the graphic novel History of Jerusalem (Garbuix) by Vincent Lemire and Christophe Gaultier chronicles 4,000 turbulent years of a city that is the spiritual capital for more than half of humanity. And the protagonist of the novel At the End of the Night (Alfaguara), by Israeli Nir Baram, where he cannot return is to Tel Aviv. For the death of a friend… that he is still alive. In the middle, the rubble of silences and family and political tragedies.
Of course there are many ways to look at history. In Three Enigmas for the Organization (Seix Barral), Eduardo Mendoza sets up a bizarre secret agency created during the Franco regime and still active that faces three cases that may be related to nine bad-matched agents who update the genre between intrigue and the laugh.
Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) returns with Coup de Grace (Salamandra), a thriller about American racism set in the Boston summer of 1974 when the desegregation of public schools ended in violence.
Racism that Valentine Cuny-Le Callet also examines with the comic Perpendicular to the Sun (Salamandra) in which he transfers his epistolary relationship with a man condemned to death in the United States to comics. Another must-see graphic novel: The Color of Things (Reservoir books ), by Martin Panchaud, award for best album in Angoulême, the adventures of an ingenious teenager from a more than dysfunctional family narrated with his dazzling techniques, from infographics to pictograms.
For its part, the protagonist of Baumgartner (Seix Barral), Paul Auster’s new novel, examines how we love in each phase of life with an eccentric professor who lost his wife nine years ago. And more past. Real. The Call (Anagrama) by Leila Guerriero, portrait of Silvia Labayru, kidnapped in 1976, at the age of 20, by the Argentine dictatorship. Pregnant. Tortured and raped. Enslaved Saved by a call. She borders on the sadism of Chuck Palahniuk’s The Invention of Sound, horror and snuff movies behind the gilded facade of Hollywood. Or the terror of Jo Nesbo in The House of Night (Reservoir books), with voices, devouring cabins, abandoned houses and a teenager with a tormented mind.
In addition, a literary phenomenon will hit bookstores: Ada d’Adamo died two days after her memoirs Como de aire (Lumen) were nominated for the Strega prize, which she won with this story of bodies and dependencies, of a mother, she, ex-dancer, cancer patient and a disabled daughter. Without leaving Italy, Acantilado recovers the acerbic Valentino of Natalia Ginzburg, a young man whose parents believe he will be a great man, his sisters a vain egoist, and he ends up married to a rich and older woman. And from her granddaughter Lisa Ginzburg, Three Sisters has just published Carazón, the story of two orphaned sisters without being orphans who develop a strong bond.
Desire will be the protagonist of the season through the Complete Poetry (Lumen) by Anne Sexton, who died 50 years ago and a pioneer in portraying the reality of motherhood, masturbation, abortion, menopause, alcoholism and mental health. Camila Sosa Villada will return with Thesis on a Domestication (Tusquets), eroticism, violence, tenderness, invisible pacts and guilt in a unique family between a trans actress, a gay lawyer and an adopted son whose balance falters when visiting her town. Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal produce it for the cinema.
And in Philosophy of Desire (Ariel) by Frédéric Lenoir he remembers that for Spinoza “desire is the essence of the human being.” But it can be destructive. He proposes to illuminate it with a journey through Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Nietzsche, Jung or Lévinas. Just in case, in The Sense of Consent (Anagrama) by Clara Serra he asks about desire and its communicability. And she defends, after examining the path traveled between ‘no means no’ and ‘only yes means yes’, not to leave aside the first in favor of the second.
And in the midst of the climate crisis, it won’t hurt to browse The Transformed Earth (Criticism) by Peter Frankopan, which shows how the history of humanity, from the development of religion to slavery, has been intertwined with the natural environment. And especially with its changes.