The 3 best books by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón

Nowadays, being Venezuelan and a writer, or vice versa, always awakens that feeling of a narrator at the ideological crossroads. Because half the world looks at Venezuela with suspicion while the other part observes with disturbing hope. And so telling whatever is being told takes on a tone of greater relevance because it belongs to the land in question, because it comes from a country with an ever-pending revolution, supposed international conspiracies and oil, a lot of oil.

In the cases of young Venezuelan writers, or vice versa, such as Rodrigo Blanco Calderon o Karina Sainz Borgo Its literature is already known to be analyzed with a magnifying glass. Because it is they, narrators and chroniclers of the Venezuela that will remain, who must explain what is left over and make known what is missing. Historically it has been like this. Ultimately, the writer tells and leaves black on white with the most notarial seal of the soul, which transcends the official facts.

Inconvenient at times but advantageous at other times. Because in the end the intensity is distilled, the intentionality rises and the characters come to life even if they are from the caricature of the news or reports. The point is to overcome everything and stand out with the personality of the great writers who overcome everything, because they have a hard-earned voice and authority, with powerful stories and stories that end up destroying stereotypes or preconceived ideas.

Top 3 recommended books by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón

Sympathy

A good friend of mine from Venezuela is also named Ulises. So it was no longer so exotic to discover a character with that name. But the intention is still there despite everything. Because a certain will for estrangement and fable is interpreted from a plot presented by the author from the viscera of today's Venezuela to the much more universal facts of human relationships ..., and not so human.

Ulises Kan is an orphan and a movie buff. Paulina, his wife, like so many people fleeing the ruined country in which they live, has decided to leave. Without him. Two more events end up disrupting her life: the return of Nadine, an unfinished love from the past, and the death of her father-in-law, General Martín Ayala. Thanks to his testament, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission: to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a home for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it before the indicated time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina.

The controversial testament will unleash a plot that will wrap Ulysses between the intrigues of Paulina and the shadow of Nadine, which he cannot decipher. Meanwhile, the other inhabitants of the house will project their own stories and ghosts on the strange architecture.

In a bankrupt society, where all human ties seem to have dissolved, Ulysses is like a stray dog ​​that picks up the crumbs of sympathy. Can you really know who you love? What is, deep down, a family? Are abandoned dogs proof of the existence or non-existence of God? Ulysses unknowingly embodies these questions, as a pilgrim of affection in a post-love age.

Sympathy, by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón

The Night

No historical fact begins from the anecdote. And blackouts as brutal as those that Caracas has already suffered on more than one occasion could have led to any type of social revolt in a large city plunged into darkness. Even so, great stories do always start from an anecdote or chance...

caracas 2010. The energy crisis is used by the revolutionary government to decree power cuts that, for hours, turn the entire country to black. In these periods of time, Venezuela seems to go back in history towards a new Stone Age that seeps through all the cracks. In the midst of this atmosphere, two friends, a frustrated writer and a psychiatrist used to being involved in the lives of his patients, discuss a series of crimes that occurred in the last year.

Pedro Álamo, another of the characters in this polyphonic novel, obsessively searches in the word games - those he creates and those he dreams of his admired Darío Lancini - for the key to understanding the crazy world in which he lives. As if he were seeking to convert reality into something different, changing the order of the elements that make it up, thus trying to find its exact meaning.

Literature, rock, dreams, violence, politics, love, absences and fears intermingle in the minds of the protagonists. They open mazes, create crossroads and short-circuits vital. With this story in which everything seems to be on the verge of delirium. Where the current Venezuela is reflected in a mirror crossed by apocalyptic shadows and its inhabitants face the destiny that inexorably awaits them; be it the fulfillment of his obsessions or death.

The Night, Rodrigo Blanco Calderon

Calves

It is always a pleasure to immerse yourself in authors who rediscover the grotesque of that Valle Inclán between delusions and a light layer of romanticism. The bitter liquor that contrasts with reality always ends up pouring out of the cocktail. Everything that happens from then on is a deep drama or revelry of the absurd, with no middle ground.

Taxidermist painters who are shipwrecked in a hostile society, the blind who know the urban labyrinths, naked motorists who circulate along the avenues, foreigners who learn a language by confessing, dying pilots who rest with the reading of Saint-Exupéry or existences abducted by Cervantes and Petrarca. Some live in the midst of Venezuelan anxiety, others with terrorism lurking in France or Mexico symbolic of the bullets of the revolution.

Impeccable and masterful in his stories, Rodrigo Blanco Calderón builds an altarpiece of nocturnal characters, who become victims and executioners of a sacrifice, of the expiation that is life at any time, in any space, in which we are all «calves ».

Calves
rate post

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.