There are things that, despite their inert nature, accumulate life. This is the case of those galena radios that broke in at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, when we can observe them in a museum or during an exhibition, or even in the home of one of those privileged people who still have a copy, we are fascinated by the rudimentary simplicity and its wonderful meaning.
In the charm of simplicity, which appears to us as something inconceivable in the age of communication and connection, a harmonious symphony between past and present, between reality and fantasy is composed.
And that's where Juan Herrera moves in his literary debut The Stone Radio. Taking advantage of that cornerstone that the old apparatus becomes, a past world is opened up to us full of sometimes bizarre, grotesque characters, all protagonists of an intrahistory of the past of a country that never came out of war and oblivion in which towns remained and people of that time. Strangeness as a way of life for all those who lived without problems regardless of whether the world continued to spin or not, if it ever had.
A novel that awakens smiles and sympathies from innocence on some occasions and from noise on others. But at the same time it offers us surprising scenes full of transcendence and wisdom. And it is that when you begin to think that those who have not risen to progress remain stuck in that kind of Babia (between reality and fiction), without knowing anything about how things work, you end up succumbing in the ignorance of your cultural centrism .
Going back to this Spain that was forgotten for much of the XNUMXth century, we recover the flavor of a lost idiosyncrasy, of the picaresque as a way of life and of tomorrow as any future. Meanwhile, the locals who occupy these pages will continue to gather each night around the stone radio, waiting for news from the rest of the world beyond their own complete world.
You can buy the book The radio of Stone, Juan Herrera's first novel, here:
At the sale on the 19th, impatient to read it A village lost during the military coup of the 36th manufacture of a radio in Galena the 300 inhabitants with their own chairs around the protagonist await news of the war, the day that he cannot tune in the radio is invented the news for your neighbors.