Literature can be ruthless, merciless. But it must be so. Well you know John Manuel Gil. Let me explain ... I recently read an excerpt from an interview with the same Bukowski. The king of dirty realism, with his reed scepter, highlighted that sadness was a product of intelligence. Something like understanding, the light of reason, condemns us to know what may not be appropriate for mere mortals like us, condemned to wander this world with more pain than glory, to know.
But what would we do without sadness? What would Dylan or Sabina write their songs about? What would the great romantic storytellers paint in this world? Why would we get emotional without the counterweight of sadness? Condemnation is salvation in the same way that, in a sinister analogy, the perfection of cells when they manage to reproduce without end leads to cancer ...
Of sadness and its placebos, of childhood and battered memory. The powerful literature of Juan Manuel Gil has that I do not know what of touching frankness that ends up raising chills. And yes, it is worth approaching this type of reading because clarity is necessary despite everything ...
Top 3 recommended books by Juan Manuel Gil
Clean wheat
Tune in to that world of childhood that faces risks only considered when maturity is reached is not an easy task. But once achieved with the virtues of a good storyteller, everything flows under the channel of our own memory. This brings to mind Mystic River-type readings from Dennis Lehane or Sleepers, by Carcaterra. Both novels were taken to the cinema precisely because of that mimetic capacity for any spectator. The best thing is that in this Spanish version everything happens much closer.
Twenty-five years after starring in a mischief that will mark the course of the life of a group of friends, the nameless narrator of this novel receives a message from Simón, a member of the gang who disappeared one day without a trace, with a proposal unexpected: why don't you write about us? About what happened to us?
Like a fake detective novel Clean wheat he follows in the footsteps of a writer willing to do anything to shape the perfect novel as he investigates a past that hardly resembles what he remembers from his lost childhood in a suburban neighborhood. A literary game in which the reader is invited to connect the pieces of a clever puzzle.
A man under water
Amphibians are superior beings. No doubt. Living in two ways and being able to survive in both is an evolutionary process that can end up convincing in the existence of God. The man under water has everything lost. It is only a matter of time that precisely that, time, pressures to continue living ... The feeling is the same when the drowning tightens having all the air to breathe. It is as if the lungs wanted to be gills of pure anguish and sadness. And precisely the memory of childhood is not the best cure.
A Man Underwater, by Juan Manuel Gil, is a round trip to childhood through memory, a story that tells us about the excessive complexity with which adults look at the world. From an unexpected event a magnificent narrative exercise is unleashed, in which the story gives way to the presence of the author and the life that surrounds him, until both end up being the true protagonists. This is an unclassifiable novel, full of rhythm, unexpected turns, in which Juan Manuel Gil demonstrates brutal literary mastery.
The lightning flower
In the search for the interesting story to tell, a writer may even sell his soul to the devil. Because the next story is what keeps you being a writer, the one that strips you the next blank pages...
This is the book of a writer willing to do anything to have a story to tell in his next novel. After winning a great literary prize, shaken by pressure and expectations, he tries to find out - ignoring any advice - what is hidden behind a mysterious scene he witnesses while walking his dog: a man cries dejectedly and an ambulance assists a person. at the garden gates of an old house.
In this crazy investigation, life and literature will soon conspire to test this bizarre method of inspiration that leads him to believe that fiction is the only valid tool to manage love, the unassailable happiness of writing or the devastating heartbreak of loss.
La flor delray is the novel that consolidates Juan Manuel Gil as one of the most original writers on the Spanish narrative scene, after winning the Biblioteca Breve Award in 2021 with Trigoclean.
Other recommended books by Juan Manuel Gil
The vertebrate islands
It is not possible to be happy in a retreat. No ascetic was or will be in his right mind. If you leave, it's because you're screwed up enough not to even exchange a greeting. Solitude calls then as a tempting echo that brings the sound of the fallen tree in the forest where there is no one. And so loneliness invites you to share with her an ultimately impossible oblivion.
Martín has found his island. A bungalow in an old urbanization. Far from everything. Lonelier than ever or as lonely as ever. There he yearns to regain the order that he seems to have lost in recent years. He builds a garden with volcanic rocks, systematizes his routine until he is buried in it and tries to corner the pain that swirls inside him. However, nothing is enough. It never is. And he knows it. Fever dreams and illness, indecipherable secrets and desire, remote islands and insomnia. Everything seems to map the pettiness, fear and compassion that shake Martin's difficult days.
With a disturbing style and a suffocating atmosphere, The Vertebrate Islands is drawn as an atlas of secrets and escapes; of characters who harbor forthcoming and dark dreams. Perhaps an archipelago of difficult questions to answer. Where is the line that separates fear from cowardice? What makes us go from compassion to contempt? On what reasons do we sustain our curiosity? What does the imagination offer us? And the fragility? A story endowed with rhythm, tension and lyricism that leaves the reader on the edge of the cliff.
