This Christmas you can’t help but be exposed for the umpteenth time to the sobering story of Mr. Scrooge, but there is always the consolation of choosing your own ghosts. If you want them from the latest generation, you will find them in the thirteen stories that make up Days of Ghosts (Lumen), where Jeanette Winterson offers us a suggestive reflection on the possibilities that posthumanism and Artificial Intelligence open up to the archetype. Ghosts also swarm around The Last Telesilla / L’últim Telecadira (Tusquets / Edicions 62), specifically in a mammoth hotel in Aspen, and if I tell you that among them could be the mysterious biological father who leads the protagonist upside down, you might scream. John Irving! The one from Exeter has never been more combative in the defense of our emotional and sexual freedom, nor so bizarre and self-referential.
However, it is already known that the most omnipresent ghosts are those that take on the appearance of lacerating questions with impossible answers that accompany us throughout our existence. Roland, the protagonist of Lessons / Lliçons (Anagram) by Ian McEwan, knows a lot about them, an ordinary individual whom we follow from his childhood in the middle of the Cold War until he is an old man in the turbulent times of Brexit. Doubts and inner demons no less bother Lucia Berlin’s creatures, a reflection in many cases of her personal troubles, which from Manual for Cleaning Women gives her stories a dazzling authenticity and freshness. A new life (Alfaguara) brings together fifteen unpublished works and a plus in the form of articles, essays and extracts from newspapers, hooray!
Now put on a shell or have the packet of tissues handy. The three works that follow are portraits of youth that are undoubtedly difficult, but also inspiring. In other words, Charles Dickens would have celebrated them, and precisely his David Copperfield inspired Barbara Kingsolver the story of Demon Copperhead (Navona, in Spanish and Catalan), a boy with a dead father and a drug-addicted mother for whom every day is a micro-story of survival and improvement, which he faces with captivating strength and irony. A well-deserved Pulitzer Prize that is an ode to the dispossessed and a fierce criticism of the institutional abandonment of the weakest.
And speaking of literary awards of many carats and made in the USA, the National Book Award went to Tess Gunty for La conejera / La conillera (Sexto Piso / Edicions de 1984), another novel at the center of which beats an unforgettable teenager, Blandine Witkins , who shares a flat with three kindred spirits when it comes to family breakdown. Until one day… boom! The trilogy of broken but resilient youth is completed by Grace, the protagonist of The Things at the End of the World (Lava), debut feature by Jenny Offill, author of Department of Speculation, who here makes a hymn to the captivating strangeness of what lies before us. surrounds, antidote against destructive mothers despite themselves.
The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Jon Fosse has not caught the Spanish literary market at fault because although the Deconatus label must be given its early diffusion with the works Septology, Trilogy and Morning and Afternoon (co-published with Nórdica), the appearance simultaneously of two novels in Random House – Melancolía, starring the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, and Blancura / Blancor, in the Catalan edition of Galaxia Gutenberg, a short and allegorical narrative about a man who gets lost in a forest– and the The announcement that Sexto Piso will bring together his complete poetry in two volumes shows that his work was on the radar of many. So be it for the readers too.
I suspect that, at this point, it is time to breathe life, to abandon the thousand and one problems of this tricky world. An extreme proposal in this line is to dive into the magic and fantasy that Witch Moon, King Spider (Seix Barral) seeks, in which Marlon James returns to African mythology to serve a binge of adventures, challenges and combats that many have transported to the universes of Tolkien and George R.R. Martin. And as a treasure chest or filigree for bibliophiles of the 21st century, S. The Ship of Theseus (Duomo), a crossroads of adventures and mysteries conceived by the filmmaker J.J. Abrams and written by Doug Dorst, and which is displayed in a cornucopia of documentary sources (postcards, notepads, newspapers, maps…).
It could well have been one of these precious specimens that one of the tenants of the labyrinthine Heap House mansion, forced to hoard an object, would have decided to guard. First installment of Edward Carey’s Iremonger Trilogy, The Secrets of Heap House (Blackie Books in Spanish and Catalan) weaves a bewitching and eccentric Victorian intrigue with strong social and ecological criticism. A home of a very different nature, but one in which the reader will feel equally compelled not to leave, is the one outlined by Dorothy Gallagher in Strangers in the House (Infinite Doll), a collection of everyday stories in which they are presented with naturalness and irony. the glories and miseries of everyone, with a seductive New York as a background.
When science and literature come together, sometimes fascinating works emerge. This is the case of Ascensión (AdN de Novelas) by Martin MacInnes, where we find a marine biologist faced with possible revelations about the origin of our planet after the discovery of a new grave in the Atlantic Ocean. Without leaving the scientific field, Miguel Bonnefoy novelizes the brilliant but forgotten Agustin Mouchot, pioneer of solar energy at the end of the 19th century in The Inventor (Libros del Asteroid). “The only thing that France keeps of him is a photograph,” says the author, who corrects the injustice.
To finish, just like a ghost passes through walls, I sneak into the memorial section for a moment because I can’t resist showing them the way to Is there anyone there? / What is there? (Chai Editora / L’Altra Editorial), a hymn to reading as a defense mechanism against any adversity and an inexhaustible source of (self) exploration. If you are reading this supplement, you know what Peter Orner is talking about.
