As a kind of chronic vocation or perhaps from professional deformation, el black gender It is one of the most common narrative scenarios in which prominent current journalists burst into force. turned into fiction writers. Perhaps it is because of its condition as a mirror where one can contemplate, without the harshness of the truth, that reality that is not infrequently sordid and even criminal.
It is the case, although not as an argument constant, of Cristina you will fail. As also happens with other journalists such as Carmen Chaparro, with which he shares that intrahistorical vision of the events that overshadow our reality.
The treatment of that darkness from which the plots of this type of novel come out acquires, in the case of Cristina Fallarás, a very complete background. A polychromatic context that multiplies the focus towards the sociological repercussion, towards the imaginary of the ominous that always accompanies each era.
Until we reach the dystopian on some occasion, the vision of the place to which that kind of perversion of humanism can lead us, a mixture of generalized alienation, boredom and ruthless individualism. Maybe they are just my things, but sometimes one reads beyond the mere plot of a crime novel to point to all these considerations ...
Top 3 recommended novels by Cristina Fallarás
Last days at the East Post
Everything is liable to end up losing its original meaning in the hands of ideology. From communism that calls for an equality almost herd of a minimum religious mandate to the benefits of a free market capable of rewarding the entrepreneur and punishing the inactive.
The dystopian appears from the moment in which the human will is capable of covering everything with Machiavellian justification. Polarizing is as easy as having something to hide, a heartbreaking fear or deep-seated hatred ...
A woman, La Polaca, besieged with her children and a small group of resisters. His partner, the Captain, has left for supplies and they await his return, with less and less hope. Fundamentalists? We don't know exactly who they are, although we do know what they are? They have torn apart the world we know and surround the house.
It remains closed, but the besieged can hear outside the threat, the screams in the night, the claws of the dogs, the sacrifices. While waiting for the outcome, she builds with her voice a story of desperate love, anger and death. With a harsh and feverish language, Last Days in the East Post is a powerfully lyrical portrait of our days, a metaphor for the hecatomb that the crisis has installed among our certainties.
You will honor your father and mother
What are the memories but part of our novel. Making a biography is the art of exalting and covering up. Because there are always things in the inkwell; even in the most committed of storytellers there will always be scenes that never happened or reasons that will never be confessed.
Even so, the story of a life is magic and the openly fictional intention of writing about oneself is a glorious recognition of that idealization of our time.
The protagonist of this book, who is not by chance named after the author, embarks on a journey (physical and intimate) in search of the secrets of the family past and of her own identity.
The search will lead Cristina to pull the thread of the stories of several generations, to discover disappearances, escapes and deaths, wounds that never healed. One of the greatest silences that surrounds it is the one that concerns some events that occurred during the Civil War: a shooting in Zaragoza, someone who died instead of another, an ensign of Mexican origin who witnessed that barbarous act, two people from opposing sides that ended up united in the post-war period ... But this immersion in family secrets goes much further and leads to other periods, to the XNUMXs, to the war in Africa, to Mexico, to skirt problems, to children who were raised in a internship…
This unique and fascinating book is written halfway between the chronicle and the novel, so that fiction helps to illuminate, to reveal those areas of shadow that the protagonist cannot access through her inquiries, the written documents that he discovers and the testimonies he manages to hear.
Fallarás proposes a narrative that goes beyond the hackneyed clichés about the Civil War and that, through the little stories, portrays the political and sociological evolution of a country. This is a novel that contains many novels, a family saga about real events that seem worthy of fiction and an inquiry in which fiction helps explain reality. A work that speaks of betrayals, disappointments and violence, but also of goodness, resistance and hope.
The gospel according to Mary Magdalene
Surely it would not be the initial intention of that atavistic machismo that greatly inhabits the most ancient institutions. And yet, today it turns out that the effort to depict women as something always subversive, sinful, forgiven again and again by magnanimous masculinity, turns the feminine into the constant vanguard of each era.
The feminine as the necessary struggle that marked the most relevant changes in moral evolution in the first instance and in everything else, consequently. We go there with Mary Magdalene, prostitute and saint...
«I Mary, daughter of Magdala, called« the Magdalene », have reached that age in which I no longer fear modesty. I, Maria Magdalena, still have the fury that confronted me and confronts me with idiocy, violence and the iron that men impose on men, men against women.
I hereby record the extraordinary events that I witnessed. My decision is firm. I met the Nazarene. I was the only one who never left his side. It is not vanity. It is so. I sit down to relate all this so that its end is understood and so many lies are erased. Nothing will be narrated in vain. »»
Cristina Fallarás writes the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene on these pages. It is the feminist, courageous and sensual portrait of a free woman, whose role in the founding of Christianity has been erased by the Church. It's time to fight the patriarchy version, because its staging has been devastating. With the voice of the Magdalena everything is understood. Who multiplied the loaves and the fishes? Are there miracles?
Other recommended books by Cristina Fallarás…
The crazy woman
In a perfect dialogue between today and the XNUMXth century, Cristina Fallarás recreates with this novel the life of a woman who is the story of many. When the story is told by women, everything changes. With Juana's silence everything is understood.
«Since her father locked her up and until his death, Juana la Loca, queen of Castile, queen of Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca, Navarra, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia and countess of Barcelona and titular duchess consort of Burgundy, remained locked up in a single stay in Tordesillas. Repeat after me: 46 years. 552 months. 2.442 weeks. 17.094 days. 410.256 hours. She locked up, despite being queen. During her confinement, Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, Luther's Protestant Reformation broke out, and Machiavelli published The Prince. Memorize it, there is data that must remain in memory to be bequeathed».
