The gift of creative versatility is found in Alan bennet one of its most fruitful representatives. Because the work of this English author moves at the helm between theater, cinema, television series, radio, theater and of course also literature.
With that solvency with which only creators who fry their creative genius know how to move and who allow themselves to be carried away by concerns without fear of change of register, Bennett achieved his literary repercussion through essays, biographies and novels. Looking for a close comparison, someone like David trueba With his varied creative palette around the cinema, the essay or the novel, he could, with the passage of time, outline a similar creative trajectory.
In this post we focus on that part of Bennett's fiction, on his most outstanding novels that precisely become his most recent work, perhaps with the intention that his plots gain that ground of the lived, of the experience, of the added value of a writer with incomparable cultural and vital baggage.
Although it is true that this section of fictionalized fiction is not where the author lavishes on further developments, his short novel fetish format always achieves the desired effect of the synthesis of his humanistic, almost philosophical ideas without losing sight of a fondness for staging within a kind of surrealism to paint humor, bewilderment and eccentricity.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Alan Bennett
An uncommon reader
Isabel II as the protagonist of a short novel about literature. A plot of impossible scenarios and an exotic plot so that in estrangement we become pregnant by the results. Because every character out of place begins by winning us in the disruptive.
That the Queen of England ends up entering a traveling library next to the palace service area disorients us right from the start. From the chance that leads her to that small space full of books, she is unleashed into an introduction to the paradise of reading that for the queen happens to be that discovery of any nascent reader.
Despite the curious nature of the proposal, and thanks to the author's subtlety, we do not find satire in this short novel despite enjoying, of course, the humor typical of disconcerting situations. Taking advantage of the alienating sensation of seeing the queen being illustrated by a commoner dedicated to the palace stove and reading in her free time.
In the end, it is a guide to the reading taste that can sting anyone at the right moment, with that feeling of the great discovery, of the power of literature against any social condition. Because if something is powerful and transformative, it is the discovery of that tasty sensation of the imagination spreading over scenarios, concepts, ideas and spaces of freedom never imaginable, even less so for a monarch dedicated to empty monotonies in the spiritual with pretensions of eternity seen from the outside. .
The lady in the van
Even the memories around a particular vital circumstance of Bennett's existence take on that magical fictional transmutation. By the way of telling it and by the facts imported from their reality.
Because the appearance of Miss Shepherd, with her van and her detachment from the world, in Bennett's life is represented by a novelty point in which each Miss Shepherd day observed by Bennett is a chapter of the stridency of living in society current. It is true that the first misalignment arises from the protagonist with her life aboard an old van, with no greater objective than to survive the day to day, with that philosophy between lucidity and disturbance. For 15 years Bennett ended up housing Miss Shepherd in his shed.
But from that first intention of solidarity he ended up discovering a will to observe, to analyze that marginalized woman that, although it did not provide him with a sociological theory, did magnetize him to end up writing this book. A work that magnifies, from the eccentric, a great representative of survival in the face of the maelstrom. A person detained, on the sidelines, far from the centripetal force that moves everything in society. And yet, Bennet reveals to us in Shepherd that privileged vision, that focus of someone who observes from the outside and is able to offer unique nuances about the creaking social inertia.
Two not very decent stories
Two middle-aged women, with their lives built from the canons, with the appropriate foundations to build life as it should be. But ought is never quite "being."
Mrs. Donaldson could have spent the remainder of her life without major alterations, fulfilling her obligations as an eternal mourner under the supervision of her daughter. But little by little she herself is escaping from those duties of normality to open up to the discovery of being without further conditioning. Due to economic necessity, he finds a job in a hospital and is soaked in that abundant humanism that emanates from diseases that change the prism of life.
And just like her, her house also begins to come to life to overcome the death of her husband. Her arrival at the house of her students who rent a room from her will end up freeing her from many things. The other indecent story is that of the Forbes family, with the stigma of a mother that marks the future of everyone. Perhaps her husband and her son Graham would like to stop being under that umbrella that, instead of protecting them from the rain, covers them with the sun.
In the darkness of her umbrella, Mrs. Forbes is unable to imagine the desire for light of the two men in her house with whom she shares that insurmountable pact of good appearances. But as soon as lightning ends up illuminating them, the stream of blinding light can awaken new worlds in the lives of the three.
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