The inheritance of Juan Rulfo more bent on the chronicle of estrangement, combining crude realism and glimpses of metaphorical fantasy found in Guillermo arriaga that kind of continuation of any school that tends to be associated for each country. And that the Mexican school has as many possible ramifications as great past and present authors.
Only in the case of Arriaga, the work diversifies and the setting changes its focus from the rural to the urban, streamlining the plots with more dialogues and making the plots more tense with experiences on the edge. And yet, that Rulfo who whispered his stories of the Llano en Llamas is still there, in the chamber of Arriaga's conscience. Perhaps drawing the existential with a hint of misty fantasy that only makes us feel even more the effect of the raw lightness that governs life.
Then we have the cinematographic side, Guillermo Arriaga's leap into a world of the script that has brought him great successes extended to the seventh art Aztec version, if the synecdoche may be permitted.
More than anything because the clearly Mexican characterization in form and substance, in a filmography that revolves around the "Trilogy of Death", serves as a brilliant sociological reflection of a capital universe of modern Mexico.
But what is fascinating about Arriaga is that duality, the compatibility, the fit between the cinematographic and the literary. And is that if his films are magnetic, his novels complete a vision of his work much deeper and more intense from the magical ability of reading to address more complex worlds filled with our imagination.
Top 3 recommended novels by Guillermo Arriaga
Foreign
The world has not advanced for centuries thanks to the work and grace of the political class, not at least as it is conceived now, so far from the first senates and agoras of the nascent West... Everything advances through the avant-garde from creativity, be it science or art, literature, ethics or any other differential activity of the human. Only that the advance sometimes supposes a confrontation with the reactionary.
Characters like William fully immerse us in that other social awakening that entails extremism to counteract centripetal forces that finally nullify their sink. The avant-garde as an almost magical daring, Ã la Dorian Gray, assuming all the risks that a new belief entails.
England, 1781. William Burton, a young nobleman, faces an encounter whose intensity will mark and change his life. Resolved, he embarks on an adventure where he will meet the geniuses of the time, from whom he will absorb all the knowledge and experiences they make available to him to face extreme situations.
Friendship, love and determination will be your allies to face a bizarre and cruel world, in which your character will be tested and you will have to demonstrate if you have the courage to become who you want to be or you will forever regret your lack of courage. .
Strangers covers the fascinating takeoff of science in the eighteenth century and its struggle with religious and aristocratic positions. At the heart of this novel lies a profound reflection on the unfathomable human condition and empathetically takes us into the world of the different and the anomalous, in a parade of endearing characters with lives on the edge.
Arriaga takes a turn in his narrative with this masterful novel, whose fierceness leads the reader to vertigo and to confront himself with his most intimate fears, sorrows, and prejudices.
Save the fire
The soul is the spark capable of awakening the fire. Because beyond consciousness we find the primary elements of which we are made. And yes, we are a large part of water in the material.
But fire is the other part that gives us life and consumes us from the oxygen we breathe. Perhaps it is that José knows of that fire that inhabits the hollow of the soul and gives himself unceremoniously to its demands, for better or worse...
Nothing better than destiny determined on its part to provoke the encounter with Marina, located on the other side of the vital spectrum, where fires buried with the sand of routine and the assumption of convention are unknown. But of course, fire has its risks, the danger of losing one's mind when surrendering to the fire that devours everything, where vanities and desires, dreams and guilt are burned, purifying the soul without taking into account the fire caused around it. The plot is enriched by her multifocal vision.
Everything that happens is located in the center of a universe presented by various observing characters, perhaps at the beginning but finally surrounded by fire. With that component already inherent in the author of a critical account of the social, Salvar el fuego throws us into the open grave to the most perverse imbalances of our current world with an original story towards the conviction of the impossible as the only way to synthesize what is necessary from the violence, love, discovery and liberation from fear.
The wild
The truth is that there is a component of innovation in Guillermo Arriaga. And there are many who evidence it from the formal, in the narrative technique. But it may be that the appreciation of what is innovative is also a matter of the transgressor of Arriaga's plots, of the linking component of the literary with the behaviorist, with the analysis of the motivations probed masterfully by Arriaga, as if he himself lived in his characters to the limit and could trace the deepest motives.
An arduous task lightened by the interventions of their own characters, sometimes colloquial, always hectic, heartbreaking life. In this narrative power, a character like Juan Guillermo, abandoned to his misfortune as an orphan in a monstrous world, becomes a Hamletian character, in torment before the natural age of torment. and such a balcony towards the abyss serves for a plot focused on revenge as the only way of survival, as the only possible end.
With a disconcerting point but that in the end unloads the plot and draws that strange parallel line between existences that could never intertwine, the emergence of Amaruq is captivating. Amaruq appears practically lost between Canada and Alaska in search of the wolf that he longs to hunt as if it were the last thing he had to do in his life. The fusion of both stories sounds like echoes of both worlds, of dream references of one case over the other. But in the end, magically, they end up being the same.
Other recommended books by Guillermo Arriaga…
The buffalo of the night
The most intimate history of Arriaga. Because the plot delves into the inner universes of the protagonists of the existential triangle.
Gregorio, Manuel and Tania compose a tragic story that aims to demand life and love despite everything, but that in the end ends up receiving the punctuation of madness with lacerating psychological pain. Because friendship never goes well with shared passions.
And yet, the inevitable is just because, without any possible allegation. Since human beings found in fiction an unparalleled channel to balance emotions and essential searches, love and death became the opposites of any narrative.
Arriaga has been able to offer us a new reading on the same border that separates eternal joy from love and the unbearable pain of heartbreak that leads to madness with the theatricality of classic stories or with the disturbing proximity of a current narrative like this one.
