En Nickolas butler we find one of those narrators of existentialism more attached to circumstances, to life, to the action of the passage of time, to the transforming instants ... That magic that is composing our present and that in the literary sense acquires a mirror value that it thrills when the author is able to sketch our living reflection.
Butler studies and analyzes his characters, offers them to us with their most complete edges to awaken in one way or another that empathy that makes us immediately connect with the avatars; with the knot of history; with the aspects of the loser on duty or the triumphant protagonist who enjoys the inherent irrelevance of success.
Always pivoting around those vital circumstances that mark decisions and that can write prosperous destinies or dotted with dark guilt, failures, phobias or many other derivatives.
La Nickolas Butler bibliography it is not very extensive yet. But your readers around the world are already waiting for you to lavish on new stories.
Top 3 recommended novels by Nickolas Butler
Point-blank love songs
There is a curious recurring plot for writers or filmmakers anywhere, in which reunions between friends serve the disruptive, the twist of fate, a scent of transcendental change or a smell of buried secrets. And the reader can soon guess it from the effusive hugs of the vital reunion.
I think the authors do it knowing that the privilege of being able to analyze an entire life or all the lives of the protagonists in a single novel offers an almost messianic perspective. As if we readers were the gods who know and rule over entire destinies.
But of course, then there is the narrator's ingenuity to propose the twists, to offer that fascinating glimpse of the path taken by each character that evokes our own lives and our own decisions. In this case Henry, Kip, Ronny and Lee meet again in Little Wing, a small place with no further history so that the protagonists can shine even more in the narrative.
Each of the four boys lived their lives in that balance between imperatives, desires and circumstances. The question sometimes is to demonstrate how successful our path taken has been. The wedding that brought them together so long later is a perfect setting to refresh experiences filled with alcohol.
But precisely like this, uninhibited, they start out laughing and end up entering the darker areas of their common past. Four old friends and four very different destinies around music, business, bohemia and invincible roots. A fantastic cocktail to face life with all its lights and shadows.
The hearts of men
When someone like Nickolas Butler set out to write one of those life stories, in which we know the characters from infancy to full maturity, he was running a natural risk of falling into the naive when it came to the first narrative of ages. children respects.
But the truth is that meeting the meticulous Nelson, so perfectionist that he is strident and repellent to almost all the other boys, and Jonathan who should be his antagonist due to his halo of popularity and admiration, is emotional without easy sentimentality.
They both share a summer camp and from their polarized positions in terms of status they end up finding the magnetism of the opposite. Perhaps at the beginning it is just a question of mercy on Jonathan's part, but what results in the end transcends that first approach to the small being humiliated by a small god of childhood.
That summer of 1962 led to a coincidence and friendship. Growing up is a bit of denying what you were, what you thought and what you hoped to become. The future of the children is presented to us with its edges, with its moments of extreme disenchantment, with the violence of contradictions and the breakdown of the defenses with which you manage to survive this denial of the child you were.
From Nelson and Jonathan, life continues to be enigmatically extended to new generations… We left the XNUMXth century and reached the XNUMXst century. New perspectives as life opens new paths. And always, surreptitiously, both in the vital and in the merely narrative, the thread of friendship is moving, of that illusion that in childhood was full and to which we always want to return ...
Something to believe in
In this third Butler novel we delve into previously seen scenes in Wisconsin. Only this time they become more than just locations known to the author. In this book there is something telluric, of fusion with the earth from a landscape approached in greater depth for this plot.
It will be because on this occasion we enter into relationships much more intense than friendship, the roots of family. Thus, the novel unfolds at times between the interior of the farm where this family lives and the extensive territory, as an allegory of the impossible balances between roots and human ambitions for new destinies.
Lyle Hovde and Peg, his wife, welcome prodigal daughter Shiloh with open arms. Together with her they can finally welcome the new six-year-old member, little Isaac. In the great happiness that is occupying the souls of the grandparents, there is also a dark feeling of longing for Lyle's own lost son...
To top it all, Shiloh's new relationship with a preacher unnerves his father who has to support himself to avoid making old mistakes that alienated him from his teenage daughter. But Steve's charlatan, with his religion for desperate believers, begins to lead his daughter in unexpected directions, and even little Isaac may be in danger. The question is how Lyle and Peg can cope with a big dilemma without everything blowing up ...
