Nothing like literature to discover those special beings that undoubtedly inhabit among us.
Thinking of Olivier Messiaen as a literary character can come close to the assumption of imagining Grenouille, from the novel Perfume, revealing the mystery of his olfactory gift, that sensory capacity far above his gray world.
Except that the Olivier Messiaen thing was the gift of hearing. Otherwise with similar parallels around a world as gray or more than the sordid setting of the great novel by Patrick Süskind.
Olivier was ordered by World War II at the front of the battle of France in 1940. And there he was taken as a prisoner. The most paradoxical of all was that, during his imprisonment by the Nazis, he composed his famous Quartet for the End of Time. And it is that the tragic, the rugged, the miserable and the sinister can also find some kind of sublimation on the tightrope of resilience or despair.
Mario Cuenca-Sandoval addresses this well-known aspect of the author, but in the end he does not stop novelizing his life as they deserve to happen to this class of great characters in history who reach at that point of fiction the heights of greater greatness that crude realism does not always allow .
So the author composes a brilliant narrative in which he mixes Olivier's ornithological passion, his religious devotion and, above all, music. For an innate genius like Olivier, music is a superior channel of communication. Language has its shortcomings, music does not, sound can be full and acquire new colors that color our emotions.
When a musician has that ability to decipher the particular magic of sounds, we simply have to listen to his music, that trace of divinity that moves between the waves of the air, suspending emotions and sensations, confronting reason and intelligence, overflowing it with the virtue of the abstract, of the intangible ...
You can buy the book The gift of fever, the new novel by Mario Cuenca Sandoval, here: