Before thirty John Bonilla He was already pointing to the self-fulfilling prophecy of being a writer. A prophecy loaded with will more than any form of providence. Because writing is already known ... (repeat in unison: 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration).
But neither can it be denied what talent there was then and it was just a matter of insisting on that of literature as a vital channel. And Bonilla took the road not to leave it until today, with that suprareligious devotion of the creator convinced, delivered and hooked on his drug.
As you know, Rome is reached by very different paths. And so other writers of his generation as they can be Jesus Carrasco o Jon Bilbao. came later. But all of them, above all these and some others like these, clean, fix and give splendor to language, as the language purists like literature to be.
Which is not an obstacle (formal delicacy, I mean) to beat reality with that harshness between the existentialist, the fatalistic and the necessarily vital despite everything. Literature to vibrate from an empathy from the very inside out, from the wells of the conscience of the characters to the world built on them and on us.
Top 3 recommended books by Juan Bonilla
A herd of wildebeest
The kindest siesta curiously takes place while in the steppe shown on our television the animals surrender to being you or me, survival made pyramid. And in those sinister preonyric adventures, the wildebeest always ended up losing with their scrawny body and their puny antlers.
The protagonists of this book: wildebeest who have to face a pond infested with crocodiles without knowing if they will be the ones sacrificed for the herd to pass. Many of them are adults visited by the adolescent they were. Seen from afar, never told in situ, the adolescence of the characters in this pack can be reflected in ambitions that will have no choice but to be unfulfilled - a wish list, falling in love with a movie star - or in achievements that take too long to arrive, when they are no longer more than a candid celebration that multiplies nostalgia - the rise of a small team to the first division, the revenge with which they want to return an unconquerable greatness to a minor poet.
The maximalisms typical of adolescence are here corrected by the narrative gaze, always already located in a place from which it is known that that lost paradise was never a paradise and remains with such force in us that it will never be lost either. of a mother in a hospital, the relationship with a father through the failures of a soccer team, the tables that a boy makes to Bobby Fischer in a simultaneous game, the forgetting of a credit card pin, the crying of a baby in the neighbors' apartment, are some of the starting points from which the wildebeest in these stories try to pass the terrible pool infested with crocodiles.
Forbidden to enter without pants
As obvious as they may seem, common sense must be made explicit at times. Especially when you face eccentric characters for whom protocol and decorum are impositions and barriers to jump.
Mayakoski must not have been an easy fellow. Consistent yes and convinced that the moment you lose faith in the principles that moved you in youth, one must leave the scene, well too. The eccentric is admired when it comes from a being of light in the creative, from the ingenious poet and social disruptor. It would be another thing to put up with it at home.
But books are not written about that because myths are dismantled. And myths, like anything that can raise us above our condition, are always necessary. Juan Bonilla follows in the footsteps of Vladimir Maiakoski, one of the most charismatic figures of the Russian avant-garde. New York, London, Paris, Moscow and Mexico are some of the settings in this gripping novel, in which Bonilla delves into the life of a groundbreaking character who lived with overwhelming intensity his passionate love affair with Lily Brik, allowed and encouraged by her husband, in one of the most famous trios in world literature.
The book finder novel
Juan Bonilla is another fervent believer in life after death there by the cemetery of forgotten books that he built Ruiz Zafon. Because beyond the change of third towards the commercial literature of the Catalan genius, the idea in both cases is to write about books and literature, about reading drives, food for the soul and intellectual passions not always understood.
I don't remember a day when I didn't look for books, confesses Juan Bonilla, who tells in these pages the story of a passion - a vice or a sport, bibliomania - that is also or above all a way of life. His account does not pretend to be neither an apology nor a historical essay, only a disordered memory, because the search for books is like that, disorderly and hazardous. It is its main charm, knowing when you go hunting that you do not know what you are going to find, which requires what Nietzsche asked to appreciate the melody of existence: to be permanently attentive. Books and bookstores, innumerable inquiries and many associated stories that make up, like the volumes of the personal collections, a kind of autobiography.
Goals have long been left in the gutter of good intentions and the desire to search is fulfilled in itself: the library is an organism that rejects the whole idea and firmly believes in infinity. There is always some volume to conquer, some that is beyond, not only those that belong to the future, but also those that are hidden in the folds of the past.
1 comment on “The 3 best books by the surprising Juan Bonilla”