If you recently talked about Lina meruane as a powerful new voice in Chilean literature, I couldn't forget a single Carla guelfenbein with its late but meteoric trajectory. A performance as a writer full of both commercial successes, nevertheless rooted in a deep narrative of sociological depth.
The trick is to have something interesting to rescue from the machinery of reality and know how to tell it in fiction. Always with that meticulous construct of realistic writers, capable of offering mirrors of our days so that every reader can reflect on essential mimicry.
Above all because Carla's realism is built from the impressions gathered by the soul of her protagonists, from the unfathomable subjective cosmos of captivating characters in their depth, in their vital baggage, in their philosophy of life.
Building with that goldsmith's meticulousness, everything else unfolds with the natural and overwhelming cadence that reaches us when we feel that we are living under a new skin. Love, absences, spite or hope thus give off aromas and also manage to transmit flavors, practically spiritual nuances, with imperfections and mismatches between reason and what we can harbor from the soul.
Top 3 recommended books by Carla Guelfenbein
The nature of desire
Two planes that intertwine between reality and fiction, between convenience and opportunity, between expectations and circumstances. Love or rather infatuation is a straight line that runs through everything with the urgency of a ray of light. Blinding, capable of starting a fire that relieves the chill of living. But it also sparks the fire of the lives that continue to link together around that opportunity to go through everything without more contingencies than what marks the purest desire.
A couple builds an intense relationship for years, parallel to the life that each one leads in their country, meeting in different cities around the world and maintaining an obsessive written and telephone communication. The protagonist is a writer who lives in London and who has separated some time ago after the death of her son. Upon meeting F., an attractive and presumptuous Chilean lawyer, her desire is immediately and voraciously aroused and she is rehabilitated in affection, trust and the ability to enjoy her. But the disappointments are far from over.
Written with fast and evocative prose, The Nature of Desire explores the areas of the body, mind and world where desires are born and expand until they dominate everything. Carla Guelfenbein achieves a novel about how blinding passion can become and about how powerful the illusions or fictions that we invent to continue believing in something, and that can often lead to abandonment and despair.
With you in the distance
Sometimes the great literary awards do not quite transfer their recognition to the word of mouth of the readers, which ends up turning a novel into a bestseller with the added mark of the award. It was not the case of this novel that obtained a parallel accolade from the jury, critics and readers.
Vera Sigall and Horacio Infante are united by a love of youth and their passion for literature. Also a mysterious bond that two young people, Emilia and Daniel, try to unravel. However, this is not the only enigma in their lives. One morning, Vera Sigall falls down the stairs of her house and falls into a coma. At first, the notion that his fall was not an accident appears suspicious to Daniel.
But with the days and weeks, the doubt will grow until it becomes a certainty. Emilia and Daniel will find themselves searching for the truth about the mythical writer's accident but, above all, in the need to understand their own destinies. The labyrinths of love and lies and unequal talent as a challenge for a couple are the great themes of this novel by Carla Guelfenbein, an author who has dazzled Coetzee and thousands of readers around the world.
The rest is silence
An evocative title that already anticipates the strength of voice, communication and dialogue in its lyricism. But at the same time also in silence there are interesting communicative aspects that the author raises to the nth degree in that universe only achievable from literature. There where, thanks to the reading and its magical direct translation to us, we also see what the protagonists think when the words spoken are exhausted.
Carla Guelfenbein builds a moving plot in this novel, which captivates the reader with remarkable subtlety. Three characters speak in the first person about themselves and a reality they live without realizing the other points of view, while the threads of life intersect to weave a braid of loves and disaffections. Diverse generations, very different situations, but all intensely living their own process. A brilliant and agile handling of dialogue, authentic, credible, reduces the descriptions and enriches the work.
Everything is magical, but real at the same time and, although, as one of her characters says, none of this is new and probably the course of events predictable, the author keeps the reader attentive to all the rich details of the three voices that they present the story.
Other recommended books by Carla Guelfenbein…
Swimming naked
Swimming against the current and doing it with the nakedness of someone who immodestly exhibits himself in the face of the prevailing dictates. That is what this trip through the turbulent waters of historical circumstances is about, determined to silence any attempt to open this exhibition of freedom.
Swimming naked confirms Carla Guelfenbein as an author who knows how to unravel the deepest depths of the human soul, through delicate writing, sensual and provocative images, which move the reader by revealing the deep fissures that her characters hide. Subtle, lucid and compassionate. Sophie has never felt as protected and happy as she does in her friendship with Morgana. These young women, whom fate brings together in the turbulent Chile of the early 70s, discover that there is much they share, but that above all they are united by their sensitivity to art and poetry. Together they form a nucleus with their own codes, which they feel are indestructible.
They are also deeply linked by the same love, Diego, Sophie's father. However, the overwhelming passion between him and Morgana will cross the border of the forbidden, breaking his daughter's only area of ​​stability. Almost thirty years later, the events of September 11, 2001 shake Sophie already established as a visual artist. Another September 11 returns to her mind, the one that cut short the lives of her family, which she never wanted to know about again. Now, for the first time, she will risk opening a small space to that past that she blocked in an attempt to recover what was lost.
