The Aragonese writer Irene Vallejo professes a literature of great depth with its inspirations brought from the ancient world. And so it is discovered that his PhD in classical philology It is the result of an unquestionable vocation, derived from a literary work that gains substance with each new publication.
What better way to approach and convince about the fascinating Greek world than to launch into the novel or the most enlightening essay as shop windows? We recently reviewed a great novel about a singular protagonist from Greek mythology: Circe by Madeline Miller. In the case of Irene Vallejo, with each new story we meet many other characters from that world in transition between reality and fiction, between legend and history.
Thus, with that decided step between research and popularization books, some juvenile books or historical novels brimming with knowledge (duly adjusted to the needs of hooked plots), discovering Irene Vallejo is one of those imperative recommendations.
Top 3 recommended books by Irene Vallejo
The archer's whistle
Nothing better than starting with one of those fictions by a narrator as documented as captivated by classical antiquity. That History, strung with gold threads that rescues the mythological and composes epics of remote days in which humans coexisted between claims and whims of gods while tracing the destinies written by Divine Providence.
But we also found the most unruly humans who faced them, challenging them to establish themselves as heroes of will and perseverance without fear of death possible in such challenges. On this occasion we know the journey towards the salvation of an Aeneas from whom the Roman people and their glorious Empire would be born. And how Virgilio gave himself up to the cause long after he magnified his legend.
With that touch of wisdom extended to the present day in social and political matters that fascinates from the ancient impression that there is nothing new under the sun, this adventure also delves into the mythical relationship between Aeneas and Dido, Queen Elisa, the other great protagonist of the great epic idealized by a Virgil in charge of giving luster to the origins of the Roman empire.
Irene Vallejo is in charge of fitting together all the times and all the books of the epic of Aeneas, extending with ingenuity towards aspects that magnify even more if possible that remote world that would illuminate the entire West.
Infinity in a reed
There are everlasting images, instants that survive the passing of time, like books are in charge of collecting time after they are in charge of making the most complete chronicle of what has been lived.
Perhaps there is the image of that infinity in a reed swayed by a current raised on the banks of the river of life. But beyond the possible intention of the title of this book, we find an epic about books treated from a documentary perspective but exposed, like a reed, to changing historical winds that move the leaves through settings centuries removed from our civilization.
The desire to make every moment known led to efforts to preserve the books, in the worst moments they were banned or burned... and much further back, because the old parchments were also the first books.
Something that today can even be observed as a more recreational function, pointed from the beginning of writing to the need for the subsistence of wisdom, for the transmission of testimonies, for essential legacies for any heir willing to lose themselves because of what is narrated.
Mainly the readers made possible the dissemination and survival of the books, from the most official ones and their translators to those less in line with the times and their preservers. Socrates did not write anything.
But nothing would be of him without anyone to write what he thought. In that necessary battle that advances from the first waxed tablets to hijacked editions or public burns. Everything is part of a fascinating sequence that the author rescues in this essay on essential history, that of books even when they did not yet exist as such.
The buried light
The vocation of a writer always seems to have gone in parallel with that tireless investigative taste for classical cultures. And the author, who would later summarize the two areas in far-reaching fictions, began with a novel about the vicissitudes of Zaragoza facing the Civil War. In the crucible of intrastories that merge into history we occupy the existence of the typical family immersed in the fatal inertia of events.
The determination of life to continue making its way despite everything, in the face of a reality decomposed by fear, the violence that splashes too close, the drastic changes and the gradual deterioration of all notions of humanity. Precisely in that taste for what is atomized within such an intense and dramatic historical development, the plot is clothed with that necessary brilliance, with the outbreaks of love among barbarism, with the determination to survive the shadows, when precisely the darkness insists on consume everything.
9 comments on “The 3 best books by the fascinating Irene Vallejo”