Fiction can be written about the heaviest matters of the soul, about all those contradictions that our existence contains, about guilt and regrets, about the feeling of defeat regarding the time that escapes. But you have to know how to do it.
The truth is that, in this case, the nature of the story helps a lot to alleviate the transcendental burden of the matter. The brushstrokes of a short story are capable of transmitting more than the largest of the descriptions of an extensive work. But you have to know how to do it
Denis Johnson knows how to do it. And this book gives a good example of it.
In the five stories that make up the book we delve into very disparate life projects, but always brimming with the deepest sensations approaching the end. Characters who face what they are with a veiled smile faced with tragedy, with melancholy turned into that full happiness of being sad. Because they have no other choice.
For the five protagonists there is always a glimmer of full beauty in life. Especially in its greatest final enigma. Otherwise the most beautiful would be submerged in the pathetic darkness of reason that has made them face their fears or pile up old traumas; or that it looms them into the abyss of the emptiness of a consumed life, when all time past announced the eternity of the moment as a false slogan seen in the today of its last days ...
After loving intensely or hating without possible amendment; After the greatest successes or the worst mistakes, these characters do not care about the accessory of their circumstances, since the nostalgia is the same. And they only have to uncover the farce and laugh at the crudeness of the time trick that nullifies any conquest or buries any possible error.
Death haunted the author while he indulged in these stories. An act of deliberate farewell literature. Five characters that may well be just one. Because in the end we live many lives, different situations, different scenarios and we have to say goodbye to all of this.
You can now buy the book The Mermaid's Favor, by Denis Johnson, here. With a small discount for accesses from this blog, which is always appreciated: