There are books that contain true and incredible stories in which a person overcomes adversities that one would believe were insurmountable. In its pages we discover what human beings are capable of when they face extreme situations. These stories become life lessons for those who read them.
The shocking story of the survivors of the plane crash in the Andes gave rise more than three decades later to The Snow Society / La societat de la neu (Alrevés), by Pablo Vierci. The book, republished again and with photos from the film by J.A. Bayona, captures the residue that that tragedy left in each of the survivors, how they got their lives back on track, their reflections and the feelings that have accompanied them since then.
The Photographer of Auschwitz, by Luca Crippa and Maurizio Onnis (Espasa), or The Survivor of Auschwitz, by Josef Lewkowicz and Michael Calvin (Newton Compton Editores), continue to provide testimonies of the horror of the Holocaust. The first novels the story of Wilhem Brasse, who had to immortalize victims and executioners with his camera before enlisting in the Resistance. The second tells the story of Lewkowicz, now 96 years old, who lived the unimaginable in six concentration camps. He was the only survivor of a family of one hundred and fifty members and has dedicated his life to collaborating in the persecution of those responsible for the Nazis.
The Barcelona native Laia Perearnau has built La passadora / The Passer (Destiny) about the figure of Sol, a young woman who had to leave her town after witnessing a murder and who will end up in Andorra helping different people escape from the Nazis. Fleeing and trying to cross the border are present in each of the pages of the moving Solito (Random House / Edicions del Periscopi), the testimony of Javier Zamora, which reconstructs his journey when he was nine years old from El Salvador to the United States.
Exile permeates The Book of Farewells (Periférica) by Bosnian author Velibor Colic, who left his homeland during the Balkan War and had to face life in France again. The same war conflict occupies the republished novel The Ministry of Pain (Impedimenta) by the Croatian Dubravka Ugresic. A professor and a group of students at the University of Amsterdam will try to find meaning and a way out of the anxiety that invades them.
“Books do not contain life, they only contain its ashes,” wrote Marguerite Yourcenar. But through these relics we reconstruct what existed. The particular experiences contained in some books connect us with a human universal. A minimum unhappiness / A minimum infelicitat (Tránsito / Més Llibres), the first novel by the Italian Carmen Verde, is focused on the relationship of little Annete, with a fragile structure – her bones do not grow – with her mother, Sofia, who avoids that reality. The mother again and again as a great theme in life and literature.
Donatella Di Pietrantonio has recounted in My Life is a River (Duomo) the ambivalent bond between a daughter and her mother when she can no longer respond or give explanations. And a third Italian author: Ada d’Adamo, who posthumously won the latest Strega prize for the short and moving autobiographical book Como de aire (Lumen). The author, sick with cancer, talks to her daughter Daria, who has suffered from a serious disability since birth.
Lisa Ginzburg – Natalia’s granddaughter – successfully captures in Carazón (Three Sisters) how the absence of the mother conditions the existence of two sisters and their relationship. A wound from the past also marks the sisters of Les papellones no mosseguen, by Marta Bayarri (Navona). About finding the measure in motherhood, between distance and overprotection, is the novel by Israeli Hila Blum, How to Love a Daughter / Com estimar la teva filla (Salamandra / Edicions 62).
Caring for loved ones when they suffer from dementia is the focus of Journey to Unimaginable Lands (Asteroid Books), by Dasha Kiper. The latest novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos, The Past Is Behind Us (Anagrama), addresses distances, life choices, the uprooting of a son who returns to his troubled town in Mexico to care for his elderly parents.
There are stories in which the characters’ efforts to make a kinder world shine. Antonio Iturbe publishes Music in the Dark (Seix Barral), with roots in a family history. In 1930 Mariano, a clarinetist and tailor by profession, settled in a rural neighborhood of Zaragoza where, despite the difficulties, he managed to organize a music band with hard-working and humble people.
Personal relationships, company and conversation are present in Mrs. Yeom’s Amazing Shop (Duomo), by Korean writer Kim Ho-Yeon. Dokgo is a man who has lost everything but will be reborn through contact with others. As do those people who have chosen to smile even when life gets difficult for them. The latest Feel Good award, Laughter scares fear (Plataforma), by Sergio de la Calle, is committed to joy in difficult times. And this is also very human.
