Football and literature are more united than one might believe a priori. In fact, whoever writes here also embarked on the adventure of such a miscellany in my novel Real Saragossa 2.0, prefaced by emblematic footballers of that club. The point is that my approach to Juan Villoro It was produced precisely because of that love for the beautiful game and that fusion of the narrative with the green of the grass.
His first book I came across was about the divine and the mundane around the world of football., with inspirations from the fascinating as well as disturbing Maradonian religion and even with the final serenity of the most antagonistic and reflective character in the world of football: Valdano. But that was just an approximation that served to bring new books to my hands under the excuse of the author already read. And what came next no longer orbited around the ball.
On the contrary, he was an author with sociological foundations, a companion version of his compatriot Carlos Fuentes that in his fictions also delves into the Mexican imaginary that has reached the present. But his bibliography of course does not stop at localisms and ends up serving the cause of the chronicle of our days.
Top 3 recommended books by Juan Villoro
The land of great promise
From the most suggestive presentation of the anomalous comes the most successful metaphor and the invitation to discover reality from another prism. Amid the hubbub of hasty words that emerge like a pandemonium of confusion and soon forgetfulness, the grounds remain. For those who know how to decipher, there are the last certainties about what there is.
Diego González is a documentary filmmaker who talks in his sleep. He is married to a sound engineer who tries to decipher what he says in his dreams. He moves to Barcelona, but the past catches up with him like a nightmare. The visit of an old acquaintance, the journalist Adalberto Anaya, upsets his recent tranquility. Anaya (who has watched Diego for years with the almost excessive attention of an admirer) blames him for having made a documentary to deliver to a narco. Diego is forced to deal with this enemy who is, at the same time, his only ally.
The land of great promise is a metaphor for contemporary Mexico. A broad reading on the interweaving of corruption and intimate life where truths are spoken in sleep. A reflection on the way in which art influences reality and in which reality distorts art. A novel as political as it is personal that maintains Juan Villoro as an exceptional witness of our time.
Reef
Undoubtedly a critique of sheep tourism compared to the most authentic trips and the adventures undertaken as an engine of change or learning. The resorts on the other side of the world do not contribute anything except the easy photo for the social profile on duty. At the extreme of that intention to recover the taste and pleasure of discovering the trip without the all-inclusive parapet, Juan Villoro invites us to discover the crazy idea of his protagonist, the musician Mario Müller.
Because fed up with that senseless wandering between tourist airports without any kind of cultural, sensory or humanistic pretense, Mario invests in a great project: La Pirámide. People willing to face extreme adventure travel to that place. Only, as the Latin phrase says: He who loves danger will perish in it.
A novel that startles us among the calm waters of the Caribbean, that same space that can suddenly turn dark when the weather decides to exceed unsuspected limits. In the same way, what happens in The Pyramid reaches extreme enjoyment, ecstasy in all its possible variables and finally the fall. A fall that, if not definitive, can always serve to feel that your life takes on new meaning.
The witness
A new time is opening in Mexico when the shadow of the PRI, the party with revolutionary airs finally deflated by circumstances, is fading like morning mist. Julio Valdivieso returns to the opening of the new social and political cycle. It's been a long time since he left for Europe and for him everything now piles up. Too much time out. The ghosts of the distant days of a cristero war impossible for him to remember are mixed with other times of his youth.
Valdivieso ends up transforming into a kind of Dante, with his own lyrics, only supported in this case by the verses of Ramón López Velarde, even before the aforementioned Cristero war but with a voice capable of reaching today to end up convincing us that nothing he better writes the truth of what happened as a heart capable of giving music to language and written meaning to reason linked with emotions.
Other interesting books by Juan Villoro
the figure of the world
It may be that parent-child relationships give more juice in the literary. While with mothers everything tends to flow in a more natural and direct way, sometimes with fathers there are empty spaces, biographical gaps of each one that offer that space for interpretation, interest in deduction, the narrator's effort to know the part , more or less marked, which was never explicit in the relationship.
Juan Villoro recounts in The figure of the world, the secret order of things, some memorable passages about his father, the Mexican-Catalan thinker, Luis Villoro. Without the desire to make a biography in the strict sense, Juan evokes here the unique life of whoever was a philosopher, social fighter, Zapatista and author of a fundamental work.
In this book, he approaches a figure that is both intimate and public, delving into the complexities that all life has, masterfully narrating moments that unfold to understand the ubiquitous present.
Thus, he recovers the essence of a father who was present in family life in an intangible way, a father who must be investigated by a son who intuits his affections and thus renews the past. Written with great sensitivity and sharpness, this book condenses the astonishment and emotion for whom writing became "a permanent letter to the father."
The culprits
A great collection of stories that ends up being a soliloquy of each character presented in each story. And in essence it is so because the author chooses the very direct language of the first person to establish that dialogue, that interpellation of the self that always seeks the complicity of the you.
The brief has many virtues perhaps undervalued by the preponderance of the novel. One of them is that everything is possible in fewer pages and with fewer words. All these stories could be a spin off of another main story. Moments taken from novels or even from lives in which the most varied characters confess the ultimate truth of the role they play or the decision they are about to make. Randomly chosen from situations between humorous and dramatic. Few more books bring together the general feeling of vital tightrope walking.
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