It never hurts a good book of stories like the one that the good of Xavier Sarda. The best thing about a short story book is that the yarn is hardly a very clear motif. Because we can compose a free structure at our discretion. Seen this way, almost all the stories have to do with each other, from the Dinosaur of Monterroso to The swimmer of John cheever. That's what it's all about, that's how the shorter narrative differs from the great novels inevitably clinging to their structured scripts.
The brief is a sum of scenes that could well happen to us in one day or throughout our entire lives. He is something like the father who seemed to make everything up in Big Fish. A sum of stories that made up an impossible life and that in the end linked everything that a father could be before his son classified him as simply his old man.
Nothing to do or maybe everything with this book by Sardà. Because it is impossible that more than twenty stories have that overrated common thread. The question is rather to get carried away, assault each new scenario with surprise as the only script. Afterwards, the actors will take care of showing you what they can of their improvised lives. This is how mutation is easier, that abandonment of our skin like a snake to be able to enjoy the bizarre sensation of occupying, like maddened spirits, other bodies.
A municipal plenary session in which the residents decide the time they want it to do next year, a tasting menu that costs 21 euros per person and that has a deadly surprise reserved for diners, the strange case of a select group of people who want to contract the coronavirus directly from someone close and chosen by them or a Dutch agency that is dedicated to promoting the exchange of lives, are examples of the XNUMX stories in this new book by Sardà, where humor, the absurd and the bizarre run through each one of its pages.
You can now buy the book «Exchange of lives», by Xavier Sardà, here: