The first idea that struck me when I discovered this title was that it gave a very complete feeling, full of nuances. The sound inside an igloo bouncing between icy walls, transmitting but unable to communicate between the air held in the cold. A kind of surreal metaphor, dreamlike, of communication between humans or of cold as loneliness, sadness, uncomfortable recollection within the cold of living ...
And in a way the book The Acoustics of the Igloos is made up of that. Its ten stories provide images at times disturbing, others directly surreal, but always transcendental, eternal, like a cold current suspended in the air, through which the sound of lives projected between reality and imagination bounces and rebounds.
The most interesting stories pass between personal shipwrecks, start from frustrations or emerge as dreams projected on the gray of routine. And nothing better to be able to reach the soul of the characters that roam this book than to reach their imagination, transpose their worlds full of failures or sadness through a new prism of the imagination.
It's as if they, the characters, could at times really escape their lives and get visas into their dreams. Perhaps we do not know what a mother is doing with her two children in the back seat of the car ... does she run away or return home ?, but the important thing is if she still has a dream to wander through and touch happiness ...
Saying goodbye to the world aboard a cable car makes up a very successful image for two old men who know each other at the gates of nowhere or at all ... The world under their feet, moving slowly while they slide on a rope many meters from that land I was waiting for you ...
You can now buy the volume of stories The Acoustics of Igloos, Almudena Sánchez's new book, here: