Current Chilean literature summarizes between Isabel Allende y Marcela serrano (each with its narrative interests and style) the benefits of the best sellers with the dregs of the great novels. And is that everything undertaken from a feminine prism can be opened to fascinating balances that satisfy the most demanding readers.
In the specific case of Marcela, and around 30 years of profession, her bibliography composes a rich mosaic of introspection where each character contributes their lights and shadows, the ranges of colors from which they see the world of course with manifest feminism when they play.
It is an art to compose live plots with that parallel degree of detail in the protagonists. But Marcela Serrano achieves it because everything naturalizes and integrates, and that means not throwing the roll in search of psychological or sociological revelations, because that should always be more of the task of the reader who likes to stop more at each scene.
So reading Marcela Serrano is that adventure of proximity. Almost a journey undertaken towards the soul. A journey in which we move alongside the characters and that leads us to a review rarely so humanistic, from a prose as brilliant as it is forceful.
Top 3 recommended novels by Marcela Serrano
Ten women
The harshest experiences produce a kind of very deep nausea that we should not avoid. Vomiting in these cases is the liberation of speaking it, of communicating it so that in that cascade emanating from within, evils capable of hurting the soul come out.
Nine very different women who have never met before share their stories. Natasha, their therapist, has decided to bring them together in the conviction that wounds begin to heal when the chains of silence are broken.
No matter the origin or social extraction, age or profession: they all carry on their shoulders the weight of fear, loneliness, desire, insecurities.
Sometimes faced with a past that they cannot leave behind; others, before a present that does not resemble what they would have wanted, or a future that scares them. Mothers, daughters, wives, widows, lovers: guided by Natasha, the protagonists accept the challenge of understanding and reinventing their lives. A novel that surprises, moves and leaves you in suspense: a revealing and courageous look at human relationships in today's world.
The Novena
The vital future of the author is also marked by exiles and her wounds, like not a few Chileans in Pinochet's time. Hence this novel where fidelities emerge as the only lifeline against a human spirit capable of submission through fear.
As a result of an absurd accident, Miguel Flores is arrested in a protest against the Pinochet dictatorship. After a few days in the dungeon of the police station, he is sent to an agricultural area near the capital, but isolated from all political activity.
Without resources and forced to sign daily at the Carabineros checkpoint, his days pass in solitude and with the minimum to subsist. Their presence generates fear or hatred among the locals, except for Amelia, a middle-aged woman, widow and owner of the La Novena farm.
She welcomes the outcast, opens the doors of her home and with them those of a cultural and social world that represents everything that Miguel detests the most. Little by little the relationship between them makes him question his prejudices, while his feelings shift from a deep desire to hate her to a permanent attraction and bond. But chance and Miguel's political activity will cause an extremely painful and irreparable turnaround for both of them.
A moving story with which Marcela Serrano brings us into the affections of several generations of women who face the heartbreak of being betrayed and that of betraying in turn.
The mantle
Literature can be a cure through the placebo of words. Not only for readers but also for writers. I remember the case of Sergio del Molino with his «Violet hour»Regarding the loss of a child. On the paths of melancholy and also of despair, a beauty sometimes appears approached from the delivery of the prose, delving into absences. Because our missing beings are even more beautiful when they leave us.
Between the diary and the essay, El Manto is a great reflection on death and loss. Marcela Serrano addresses the mourning of her sister's death by writing a shocking and acute story.
Everything that happens to her during the year that followed this experience is recorded by the author in this newspaper where, simultaneously, she intersperses the readings on death that were accompanying her in the arduous process. Inscribed in the same poetic and family universe that has defined all her work, Marcela Serrano writes in El Manto a moving reflection on death and affections.
