As a good Galician writer, Juan Tallon pick up the baton Manuel Rivas more rooted in a Galician narrative as misty in its scenography as in its most existential background.
From that melancholy patrimonialized by the Galician and even by the Portuguese, artistic manifestations always derive loaded with the lyrical beauty that evokes the lost or never reached paradises. And there is much of that in our closest world.
The question is also to adapt that idiosyncrasy blown by an author in love with his mother tongue (that Galician of tremendous strength and telluric claim), to an avant-garde narrative that can host and balance that notion between predestination to the homelessness of the fierce passage of time , with a suggestive action made mosaic by those who do not understand traditional structures.
The result is a work with an unmistakable stamp. Juan Tallón's works of fiction have that unmistakable noséqué that ends up turning them into different and interesting now and perhaps into classics tomorrow.
Top 3 recommended novels by Juan Tallón
Rewind
Seniority is always a degree. In literature it is above all trade, style control, mastery of tools. For a writer like Juan Tallón, "intrepid" in his search for literary horizons, this is a path towards excellence made originality.
The issue sometimes points to a science fiction approach when it is really nothing more than an existentialist projection of the future of its characters from the critical point of the explosion that seems to disrupt everything or, perhaps, give order to what never made sense in their lives.
On a Friday in May, with signs of being a perfect day, a strange explosion occurs in a building in Lyon. In one of the floors of the building, which is reduced to rubble, lives a group of students from different countries who were celebrating a party that night.Paul, a student of Fine Arts; Emma, haunted by the tortuous history of her Spanish family; Luca, fascinated both by mathematics and by the cyclist Marco Pantani; and Ilka, a student who left Berlin with only her guitar on her back, are the tenants of a house that is frequented by university students in the city.
In the neighboring home, also affected by the explosion, lives a discreet Moroccan family, apparently well integrated into French life. The novel explores what happened from various points of view. Through five narrators, victims and witnesses, we learn what happened that Friday night, as well as its consequences over the next three years, until each dead angle of the explosion was covered with their stories.Rewind It investigates the possibility or impossibility of rewinding, personal ghosts, random blows, the person we are not in the end, the secrets that should or should not be told and the ability of people to remake themselves when they break .
The novel is a maneuver of espionage of the mechanisms of life itself, which changes without warning, turns, jumps through the air and destroys you without you being prepared: and equally incomprehensible or more, if that does not kill you, it allows that you rebuild and that you move on.
Wild West
An interesting parallel with those gold seekers, towards lawless territories. That itself ends up being the outrageous capitalism that we live in. And the ultimate will is none other than to find any vein to exhaust it and assault a new one.
A novel about ambition, the worst of sins and not always considered as such. As an inexhaustible plague, every historical moment has its new gold diggers. Except that things are no longer about exhilarating coast-to-coast trips to new worlds ...
Politicians. Businessmen. Journalists. Bankers. Can. Business. Pleasure. Corruption. Wild West it is a work of fiction. His characters do not resemble any real person, living or dead, but his story is the portrait of an entire era, marked by the total control exercised by its elites.Wild West is a novel about the irruption, splendor and decadence of a generation of politicians and businessmen who took over a country, and how the press reacted to the deployment of such power.
Juan Tallón has written a novel that ends up being a landscape, in a way devastating, but also necessary, of power in all its forms, with an undeniable literary talent that shines in each of its pages and in each of its characters.
Masterpiece
The things of art as speculation made art. Because for creatives, the white-collar mangants and the tricksters of the politicians on duty, capable of selling smoke as art and ephemeral art as the most consistent thing in the world...
The story that this novel tells is completely implausible... and yet it happened. It is incredible, but it is true: a top international museum - the Reina Sofía - commissioned a work by a star of sculpture, the North American Richard Serra, for its inauguration in 1986. The sculptor delivers a piece created ad hoc for the room in which it was to be exhibited. The sculpture in question -Equal-Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi- consists of four large independent steel blocks. Immediately, the piece is elevated to a masterpiece of minimalism. Once the exhibition was finished, the museum decided to keep it, and in 1990, due to lack of space, it was entrusted to an art storage company, which moved it to its warehouse in Arganda del Rey. When fifteen years later the Reina Sofía wants to recover it, it turns out that the sculpture - weighing thirty-eight tons! - has evaporated. No one knows how it disappeared, or at what time, or at whose hands. By then the company that guarded it no longer even exists. Zero clues about his whereabouts.
The mysterious disappearance is also elevated to the category of masterpiece. As the scandal gains global resonance, Serra agrees to replicate the piece and give it the status of an original, and the Reina Sofía, to add it to its permanent exhibition. Between the non-fiction novel and the fictionalized chronicle, between nonsense and the hallucinogenic, Masterpiece reconstructs at the pace of a fast-paced thriller a case that leads us to ask some disturbing questions: how is it possible that something like this happened? How does a copy become an original? What is art in contemporary art? What was the true fate of the famous, huge and heavy steel sculpture turned into air? Is it possible that one day it will appear?
To answer these and other questions, the pages of the novel host a succession of very disparate voices: those of the founder of Reina Sofía, some of its directors, the police officers from the Heritage Brigade who investigated the disappearance, the judge who instructed the case, museum staff, ministers, the businessman who guarded the work, American gallery owners, Richard Serra himself, his friend - and former assistant - Philip Glass, art dealers, critics, artists, councilors, collectors, a choreographer who danced around the sculpture, engineers, journalists, historians, security guards, politicians, a terrorist, a retiree, a truck driver, a scrap metal dealer, a taxi driver, an Interpol agent, the author of the book himself, in negotiations with a publisher to write it, or César Aira, who proposes a theory as crazy as it is delicious about the true destiny of sculpture.
Other recommended books by Juan Tallón
Onetti's toilet
Si Onetti raised his head, he could consider this title anything but an affront. Even more so after reading a work in which perhaps the protagonist is half a projection of Onetti himself forced to write a novel as expected by others and a Juan Tallón who ends up convincing him that no, that his thing is to skip all the novelistic canons to make the narrative experience, analysis of the own job of writing and ultimately life.
Despite bordering on exaggeration, Onetti's Toilet is confirmed as a literary fiction of the highest level, in which an irreproachable balance is reached between what is said and how.
Thus, the novel delves into the consequences of a move to Madrid, bad and happy at the same time, and the influence of a bad neighbor, married instead to a wonderful woman, in the life of a writer who finally finds the perfect conditions to write and still does not write, but that, nevertheless, is involved in a robbery that gives emotion to his life.And, in between, Juan Carlos Onetti, the gin-tonic, Javier Marías, a minister, the bars of Madrid, football, César Aira or Vila-Matas, even composing an altarpiece about the beauty and dignity of certain failures.
Written in the first person, with a clear interplay between reality and fiction, Onetti's toilet is the first novel in Spanish by an author, Juan Tallón, who writes with his own style, as simple as it is elevated; full, at the same time, of humor and literary quality.