There are those who come to short literature and stay. The fate of the short story writer is something like if Dante had never found his way out of hell. And there they stayed Dante on one side and Chimal on his, as if fascinated in that strange limbo of the little fiery stories, capable of greater turns and reflections.
Flashes of realism filled with the allegorical and the dreamlike. Literary sleepers that are as concise as they are wonderfully extendable towards unsuspected universes. Alberto chimal he knows that the story is like the straight line, the shortest and most direct path to the reader's imagination. Because you do not have to walk with twists or turns, or introductions or detours. The story walks naked through the world from birth to death. And each reader is commissioned to cover it in their imagination.
Poe, Cortázar o Chekhov they made the story their natural habitat. In the present Samantha Schweblin or Alberto Chimal continue in that no man's land, cultivating brief transcendences with flavors never before tasted thanks to the particular roots of everything that sounds like a story, like an intra-history of moments, like history as a caption for the photograph of reality.
Top 3 recommended books by Alberto Chimal
Fire hands
The best example of that transition from estrangement towards alienation or bewilderment but also towards passion for the unknown. Because everything depends on the prism with which we have to look. Circumstances rule and based on them the characters in these stories are never the same. A book to read and reread at different times and thus discover different messages and awaken different sensations.
A writer who practices literary plagiarism, an obsessive woman under a misunderstood motherhood or a sick woman facing the trance of choosing are some of Alberto Chimal's characters who live with their own hell, with their own dissimulation, manipulation or uncertainty.
Chimal ignites a prose that underlines the nuance of the fantastic and that always explores limits, thus being his literature game and hypnosis where we can enter and, possibly, burn us.
The saga of the time traveler
It's curious. It is not that it is the most literary social network based on its character limitation. And yet, as if it were a challenge, under the shelter of Twitter (it will never be called X) wonderful threads have developed into multi-carat literature. Alberto Chimal could not ignore the matter...
For several months, Alberto Chimal wrote through Twitter a series of micro-stories that took as a starting point the possible journey that the Time Traveler, the protagonist of HG Wells's The Time Machine, may have undertaken at the end of the novel.
These small prints, which represent a tribute not only to Wells but to science fiction, transport us to the past, present and future where we can observe the world from a privileged point of view and witness both true and false great events in history, as well as almost imperceptible daily events.
The texts, in the form of snapshots, also offer the reader very particular portraits of all kinds of characters - historical, literary, real or fictional - whom the Time Traveler, and incidentally also his cat, meet on his way: writers like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe and Jane Austen; literary characters like Helen of Troy, Dracula, the Invisible Man; recognized icons and also icons to know.
As if fiction were part of another temporal dimension, this proposal invites us to navigate the time machine that is the book itself, hand in hand with one of the most audacious narrators in contemporary Mexican literature.
The attackers
We have all taken the conversation off at some point. Relaxedly, among friends, we comment that our mobile shows us segmented advertising (a gloomy euphemism where there is any). The problem is that even an advertisement for the new brand X television appears after having commented on it in words, not in Google searches. They see us, they hear us ... What do they not know about each and every one of us?
Security cameras have given us the peace of mind of having someone watching over us. But also the uncertainty that there will always be someone else watching us. Science has eradicated diseases, but it has also created monsters and unthinkable infections. Email, social media, a phone in your pocket: consolations for loneliness, improvements in communication, but also the beginning of the end. Harassers, stalkers, impersonators. Attackers of our comfort.
With an imaginary and an absolutely personal aesthetic, Alberto Chimal –one of the great Mexican revelations of recent years– offers us, crouched between seven masterful stories, the terror with which we coexist, even without realizing it. A book of scary stories –not necessarily horror– that looks into the darkest corners of our society, without renouncing either the freest imagination, the most fantastic gaze, humor and even poetry. Although this is the poetry that comes with the end of the world.
Sympathy, I meant.
Consideration, I meant
Life diluted like ice in the drink.