Cradled in lyrics from poetry, Sarah Table He soon ended up moving his lyrics to prose, mainly focused on the novel, with the usual precious result in the forms and deep in the background of the narrative.
Based on the results, it can be considered that the materialization of the writer germinated from roots in verse, endows the narrator with a particular voice, with a distinguishing mark. I remember now BenjamÃn Prado and Carlos Zanón, authors of diverse bibliography who also came from the world of rhymes.
In the case of Sara Mesa, the passage from verse to paragraph turns into a brilliant career truffled with great stories awarded in prestigious awards.
With recent forays into rehearsal, Sara Mesa is already one of those versatile authors, committed (as they say) in transferring their chronicle vision of our days. Endowed with her powerful imagery, loaded with images, Sara Mesa writes about that world that is always apart, pending to be rediscovered by readers who discover the hidden latency of the world, essential mechanisms of our reality that only writers with the soul of poets know how to present us.
3 Recommended Novels by Sara Mesa
The
The cell of modern society, as some thinker said and later replicated the total sinister in some of their hurtful songs. And that is the part that has to be addressed in a self-respecting novel. Because there are hurtful spaces in the family. Common and at the same time very different places that are replicated in homes anywhere in the world.
A novel that invites us to peek into that distant window where movements can be seen in the dim light, where the things that make up scenes of humanity take place like theatrical performances of unimaginable tragicomedy.
"In this family there are no secrets!", proclaims at the beginning of this book Damián, the father, a man of fixed ideas and ideals obsessed with rectitude and pedagogy. But that house without secrets is actually full of cracks, and the oppression that is breathed within its walls will end up creating escape routes, clandestine codes, concealments, pretenses, and lies.
Made up of two girls, two boys, a mother and a father, this apparently normal family, working class and full of good intentions, is the protagonist of a choral novel that spans several decades and whose stories beat with the desire for freedom and criticism of the pillars that have traditionally supported, and still largely support, the family institution: authoritarianism and obedience, shame and silence.
Sara Mesa once again demonstrates that she has a clinical eye for undressing human behavior, detecting latent wounds, and portraying in all its complexity the fragility, contradictions, and weaknesses that make us up. This book is a new twist in the construction of one of the most powerful literary universes of current Spanish letters and the confirmation of a talent that does not stop growing.
One Love
Sometimes language overwhelms us in its richness, incapable despite everything of the perfect definition, of the opportune word, of the illuminating meaning that shows everything that moves us. This is a narrative exercise that strips those miseries. A fantastic resignation, the surrender before the impossible transcendence of the concept from the limited expression of any language. Love would be the note that can never be reached, but it is only the end or the beginning of the incredible limitations that, despite everything, offer a mosaic of rabid humanity in search of unattainable horizons. It is not about the grandiose or the bombastic but about the detail, the essence and the anecdotal. There where that shocking truth resides that charges us with a strange melancholic beauty of the impossible.
The story of Un amor takes place in La Escapa, a small rural town where Nat, a young and inexperienced translator, has just moved. Her landlord, who gives her a dog as a welcome gesture, will soon show her true face, and the conflicts surrounding the rented house – a poor construction, full of cracks and leaks – will become a real obsession for her. she. The rest of the inhabitants of the area - the girl from the store, Piter the hippie, the old and insane Roberta, Andreas the German, the city family that spends there on weekends - will welcome Nat with apparent normality, while mutual incomprehension and strangeness beat in the background.
La Escapa, with the mountain of El Glauco always present, will end up acquiring its own personality, oppressive and confusing, which will confront Nat not only with her neighbors, but also with herself and her own failures. Full of silences and misunderstandings, of prejudices and misunderstandings, of taboos and transgressions, Un amor addresses, implicitly but constantly, the issue of language not as a form of communication but of exclusion and difference.
Sara Mesa once again confronts the reader with the limits of her own morality in an ambitious, risky and solid work in which, as if it were a Greek tragedy, the most unexpected impulses of its protagonists gradually emerge while, In parallel, the community builds its scapegoat.
Isabel Coixet's film adaptation offers new twists to this plot. And history always offers new possibilities for diverse scenarios and surprising edges.
Bread face
Since almost and El Viejo have met, we have assumed the indecent, or at least the inappropriate. And that's when Sara Mesa has already won us over to the cause of facing those impossible outlined from the moral point of view.
Because yes, it is inappropriate for an adult to relate to a girl, even ominous from the first glance. But beyond love made taboo, Sara Mesa leads us towards other meanings of symbols that shake ethical totems. Perhaps with an inciting intention, perhaps with a will to disturb and misplace..., the point is that the spider web of our conscience, which is woven as the relationship between the impossible lovers in our light grows, serves so that the plot invites us to continue advancing through the spider web while it irretrievably traps us.
Because the forbidden hooks as long as the human being has reason. And no one indulges in what is forbidden more eagerly than those who feel separated, mistreated by their environment. From their condition of cursed for their circumstances, the protagonists tear apart the social conventions that ended up marginalizing them in their nature as collateral victims. It is curious how in her apparent simplicity, in the fluidity of her scenes, the author sows existential seeds from the transcendence of her disturbing images.
Other recommended books by Sara Mesa…
Four by four
Practically posed as a dystopia, a mirror, a symbol of social evolution, this novel places us in that privileged situation of one who observes an entire closed environment, a small world that ends up being a small replica of the entire social cosmos.
We enter under the sober entrance threshold of Wybrany College, with that feeling of advancing through a new world with its strict rules. And we are getting to know the social stratification of students, teachers and parents with the horizon of a disturbing mystery, how could it be otherwise when we glimpse the essential mechanism of everyone and their underlying interests. Education, training for boys and girls who point to hope for a decadent world.
Privileged kids in whom all the hope of a possible future is placed. Behaviorism from the moment the walls and doors are closed and the everlasting rebellious spirit of inmates like Celia and other friends who want to leave that suffocating gray space. Because, logically, there are things that we don't know about the operation of Wybrany College, although we sense that tension that leads to estrangement, alienation, attempts at violence. Until finally the light of understanding breaks through with its almost blinding lucidity.
Scar
A novel that sifts through everything with estrangement to end up discovering those contradictions and dichotomies that move essential aspects such as love or the everyday.
Sonia and Knut, two characters who feed back their alienated vision of the world, who become magnetized but who, from Sonia's perspective at least, also come to touch that tiredness in front of a personality as symmetrical to theirs as Knut's. Because he, that stranger who came into his life from the distant existence of a PI, exposes his vision of the world as fascinating as it is aberrant, that way of going through the world forgetting moral guidelines, regulated attitudes, with the authority of whom he thinks he knows truths foreign to the rest of the world.
Knut is so right and so well founded that he makes Sonia feel that feeling of overflowing with her reality. Walking away from him is an overriding temptation. But the seed of that dislocation from which it is necessary to escape is already sown and Sonia's life will advance through improvised designs of denial in the face of what is imposed.
With notes on the motivations to approach the profession of writing, around that labyrinth that involves going in search of the most internal motivations, the relationship of love and detachment between Sonia and Knut takes us into philosophical and metaphysical aspects in a cold society that abandon any pretense of clairvoyance. But in addition to that philosophical aspect that raises questions about a thousand aspects, although filtered by the agility of the plot, the scenarios vary between the dreamlike and the strange, towards surprising approaches in their continuous mutation.
