There is a disjointed stream of humor novels between the absurd, the surreal and the tragic. Let's say that I just created this stream myself. It happened to me when I discovered the hilarious coincidences between this book The sold by Paul Beatty and the specimen Sakamura and the tourists without karma, by Pablo Tusset. Two uncategorized but current books, a modern stream of grotesque and endless laughter.
Laughing at the tragic, in a credible, convincing and magnetic way is an act of literary sublimation. The protagonist of this story is a guy who, devoid of what little he had left in the world, decides to launch a continuous laugh at a world that has lost all meaning.
Shrouded in the smoke of marijuana, the protagonist of the story, recently orphaned and with no known name, considers existence as a series of pending issues that only he can take care of. Having reached the state of things to such an extreme of extreme bullshit, only his iron will can once again build a world of dignity.
Satire is the final trick with which Paul Beatty gives this story a painful laugh that flies over such sordid issues as racism taken to the extreme of slavery. But you always smile, whatever happens, Beatty knows how to get a laugh out of you.
The literary composition of a delusion of this magnitude can only be read and understood by fools who go through the same delusional period of history. Hence this novel is a masterpiece of modernity, decadence and the overcoming of everything through a pathological laugh. I'm not telling you anymore… Well yes, he was awarded the 2016 Booker Prize, no less.
You can buy the book The sold, the absurd novel by Paul Beatty, here: