It is curious how some fiction books, which cannot be limited to a specific genre, end up being labeled as plain literary works. Skinny favor is done to the noir or to the historical fiction if they cannot be considered literary novels. But it is also true that when one looks at the books of authors such as Elvira navarro or to many other chronicler authors of his time from the intrahistorical point of view, leaving them to contemporary authors is too meager.
Because authors like Elvira create literature, embroider plots, outline scenes, expose their characters on the tables of existence. All giving off that care for the form without ever forgetting the background. That balance is Literature, hence the labeling that can appear in certain classifications.
In the end, not so bad. Without the band on duty, one ends up convinced that one is simply reading life. There is, for example, no case to solve with the turn of the turn; These are close situations where the spins are already responsible for generating them, the inertias of this world in orbit. A place in constant change and movement to which we all sink without hardly appreciating it, clinging to a ground that keeps us still from the appearance of our insignificance.
Top 3 recommended books by Elvira Navarro
The island of rabbits
This book summarizes a set of stories essentially focused on the present but timeless in their presentation of estrangement, of that brilliant effect of large feathers capable of stripping our reality to be able to observe it in an impudent, cruel, true way.
Because reality is structured according to an imaginary that always points to the subjective. And that is where the metaphors, allegories or fables of the great writers end up creating a common place, a kind of limbo that all imagination can access to rescue disturbing impressions, ultimately lucid once the symbol explodes on our conscience. to leave us speechless.
The title of the book: The Island of the Rabbits, comes from one of the stories between the fable and the symbolism with different readings between the absurdity of our behavior and our propensity to find problems for great solutions. But any of the other solved stories intoxicating with that aroma of sweet fatalism of a fantastic tale always narrated under the cadence of a delicately musical decadence, as played by some musicians from the Titanic who were perhaps the first to abandon ship ...
Doom is a prophecy that fits perfectly in an environment that suddenly becomes as fantastical as it is disturbing. Characters subjected to unexpected plane changes, unknown dimensions for very common feelings. Souls that flee from among the bones before the gloomy vision of a world plunged into the abyss. A narrative collage where nonsense is the most surprising glue. A narrative collage that ends up composing a canvas that, seen from afar, offers a lucid perspective of the deepest humanity.
The worker
Thinking about it cold, normality is an entelechy and everything eccentric can be a pathological tendency that circumstances will eventually stigmatize. On how to take personal stridencies to the limit of the pathological ...
This novel, which confirms Elvira Navarro as one of the most unique voices of her generation, is perhaps one of the few in recent Spanish literature that investigates mental pathology, without separating it from the social context in which it is produced.
Elisa edits books for a large publishing group that delays payments for months. Economic precariousness forces her to share a flat with a strange woman with no past. A suffocating silence about what concerns the work and life of this unusual tenant leads Elisa to become obsessed with knowing who she is. Her questions are answered by a series of fictions with which her roommate sabotages any possibility of someone meeting her, or at least that is what Elisa believes, who does not conceive that madness is a place from which she can voluntarily build herself. .
In these pages the disease ends up appearing as a sign of normality. After reading it, the inevitable question arises whether in a scenario like the current one, where common projects seem to have vanished, it is possible to live outside the pathological and tell something that is not pathology.
The city in winter
Clara, the main character, takes her first steps in life. In the classic narrative imaginary, the life event has its beginning, its middle and its end. This book questions and breaks that sequence because the girl or adolescent traces, finds and solves, as best she can, knots, traps and outcomes. I would not dare to say that we are dealing with a learning story. It is something else: the brutal clash against a life that seems to be in a hurry to make itself present.
An almost sober or severe writing, apparently resigned to account for a dry, austere, secular pain, free of rhetorical fuss. Four narrative moments that even without apparent concession have made us remember two of the best horror stories in Spanish literature of all time: My sister elba, by Cristina Fernández Cubas, and There is always a dog on the prowl, by Ignacio MartÃnez de Pisón (by the way, if you haven't read them yet, don't stop doing so). It's shocking to think that what this book tells us is happening there, at our side, on the other side of that street along which we calmly walk.
