The 3 best books by Jonathan Coe

Everything has a place in literature, even formal sophistication as a tool understood to achieve greater ground in an almost always critical background in the case of Jonathan Coe. A Coe who knows how to make the novel his own particular fire where he burns vanities and customs with his pen made of living fire.

The best thing is to be able to enjoy all options, as in music or in any other creative facet. Although it is true that to enter Coe with guarantees of reading satisfaction, you should have hardened yourself in that reading exercise like the runner preparing for a marathon.

Once you are ready to break down intellectually with novels loaded with that sophistication, you will fully enjoy the taste for the scathing, with the intelligent irony that fills you with a critical spirit.

All this without forgetting that Coe is a great black frame builder, satirical-manners, current and even introspective, a mix between Milan Kundera y Dashiell hammett, possessed according to the moment by one or another referent. It is the good thing about an author who understands fiction as a plot seasoned with many other ingredients in search of that ideal of the timeless novel. And Coe certainly succeeds.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Jonathan Coe

The rain before falling

Under this title with existential and naturalistic echoes, we find a story between intimate and existentialist. Because listening to a vital testimony of Aunt Rosamond by her niece Gill and her daughters presents us with that story that perhaps we should all record before we die with our most certain truth, the one that is almost never fully told.

The tapes that Rosamond left were not initially for Gill, for him it was a third part of the tangible inheritance, shared with his other brother and with the strange Imogen, the blind girl of whom hardly anyone remembers anything but who becomes a piece. fundamental in the life of Rosamond.

As Gill listens to her aunt's voice and links to the photos that graphically document what was narrated, she discovers that without a doubt the best possessor of that particular legacy would be the blind stranger. But Rosamond was also ultimately willing to have someone in her family listen to her posthumous words if Imogen doesn't show up.

And what Gill discovers in those words will trace a destiny written on his soul from a remote point of origin that ends up explaining everything that is.

Expo 58,

That 1958 to which Coe guides us was a year, in the middle of the Cold War, in which Brussels opened itself to the world as a city that hosted the corresponding Expo for which the now iconic Atomiun would be built, which came to be equated with the game of Atoms as symbols of different cultures.

But the occasion looks great for Coe to insert a histrionic, humorous and satirical espionage story about diplomacy, international politics, the tensions typical of those days of espionage and counterintelligence ...

Thomas Foley, a civil servant outpost from his English homeland, arrives as far as Brussels, and he must finally learn first-rate espionage tasks by force while his personal universe suffers an earthquake of the highest degree.

Grotesque but clever humor, hints of plot along John Le Carre and a tremendous ending in the middle of a moral about the decisions we make in life.

What a deal!

A title that already points to satire and irony with an imposted burlesque phlegm of this English author. Again he disguises a story as a detective novel to inoculate his particular humor (in this case brutally critical).

The Winshaw family has enough power and recognition to feel like new chiefs in a society given and humiliated to its capitalist whims.

With that acidity of sarcastic humor that after laughter ends up leaving the residue of resentment and that is capable of exposing all kinds of social and political shame, the composition of each of the Winshaws is made of that decadent English society in the last instance when they Appearances and good words are only a sad patina towards the preservation of status above everything and everyone.