3 best books by Juan José Arreola

In the shadow of the greatest, others do not always end up shrinking. Those who may not have the enormous creativity but the will to improve, together with a learning capacity that ends up resembling the gift if the delivery is maximum.

Something like this should be considered when bringing up Juan José Arreola regarding a contemporary, compatriot and even namesake as giant as he is Juan Rulfo. Then, when life gave Arreola 15 more years, he was able to become heir to the legacy and follower of the work, with that change of focus of the genius that is no longer to whom he naturally appears as a singular predecessor.

Perhaps it is a matter of the shared language but in its countless stories and volumes, a Spanish-speaker will surely be more hooked on fantasies, dreamlike at times, and rich dissertations transforming the real or directly surrealist in his own free pen, than what could be an approach to the much praised Kafka with his fables of colder and existentialist tints.

Top 3 recommended novels by Juan José Arreola

Confabular

Arreola's repertoire of confabulations represents exactly that, a set of transgressive confabulations. Fabulations in collusion with the narrative crime to assault us mercilessly from the fantastic. So that we reflect ourselves in the new light of his whim before the mirrors that show us as deformed as they are precise, we see the most relevant details that dress us from within.

In Arreola's imaginary, magical and phantasmagoric elements are combined, a disturbing eroticism and a disturbing exploration of our deepest fears, but along with these registers, also emerges the most ferocious satire of the contemporary world and the excesses of consumer society, and a meticulous and shrewd look at human behavior: desire, jealousy, power and seduction games, pettiness ...

And all this, although it may seem dispersed or antithetical, makes up a work of admirable solidity, one of the most personal and dazzling voices in XNUMXth century Latin American literature, which shines in these stories always marked by brevity, precision and perfection. .

Confabular

Bestiario

Taking as a starting point the medieval bestiaries in which with a scientific spirit the existing fauna (and the legendary) were cataloged and described, Arreola exposes us in Bestiary his particular collection of animals that, through his poetic and ironic vision, he ends up examining to the human being.

For the conception of this book, understood as a conceptual whole, Arreola combined his already published texts and distributed them into four parts ("Bestiary", "Cantos de mal dolor", "Prosody" and "Approximations") so that first appeared with this distribution in 1972.

Bestiary is a piece of jewelry by a writer impossible to classify due to its originality and diversity, in which the conciseness of the texts only increases the surprise of the reader when discovering a fertile universe of ideas, images and themes, expressed through a apparently simple language, but rich in syntactic and sonic nuances.

There are few books in Mexican literature with the sharpness and eloquence of Bestiary. In each of his vignettes with a lapidary effect, in the strokes of his style, in the flights of his wit and in the opportune acuity of his erudition, the impeccable narrator that was Juan José Arreola appears.

Its pages combine his passion for the short essay and the prose poem. His images are no less evoked than those of the famous Fantastic Zoology Manual by Jorge Luis Borges, nor less naturalistic than the fabulous inventories that have been created around the animal kingdom.

“His field of action is the human being, since his approach to the world of animals is sheltered in Jonathan Swift and the beasts suggest the behaviors of men; however, the descriptions are portentous and not only include natural symbols but also poetic vision and intuitive knowledge "

Bestiario

Full narrative

I don't usually like compendium books. Those that end up amalgamating everything narrated by the current writer to commemorate but ultimately also reduce. Except in specific cases like those of Arreola from whom this literature without limits soon emerges. A literature that precisely in the synthesis of the single volume becomes a wonderful contrast that revalues ​​the idea of ​​the book as a container of the wisdom and magic that a great writer was able to treasure throughout his life.

A year after Juan Rulfo published El llano en llamas, Juan José Arreola put Confabulario into circulation. Later would come Bestiary, Songs of evil pain, Prosodia, Palindrom, The fair, among others, which are now gathered in this volume.

A self-taught writer who learned to read by hearsay, who never finished elementary school, Juan José Arreola was a long-term author, although his narrative is measured and laconic. A fundamental work that, together with Rulfo's, changed the course of our lyrics.

Arreola's full narrative
5/5 - (9 votes)

1 comment on “3 best books by Juan José Arreola”

  1. Thank you, your opinion will help me buy one or more books by Arreola, I saw him on television and I liked what he did and said.

    Reply

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