The 3 best books by Ramón Gómez de la Serna

On many occasions I have defended the genre of Science fiction as one of the most fertile fields of literary creation. And what science fiction has to do with Don Ramón Gómez de la SernaI'll tell you that this author also ended up visiting this genre without doors or borders, where imagination can end up developing any idea for experimental purposes or to tell the most epic of stories.

In the case of this master of the Noucentisme, his novel The Owner of the Atom surprises with his incursion into physical principles that, thanks to his handling of the trade, he knew how to make credible.

I don't know, it was to start from the anecdotal. Although precisely from there, from the detail, it is where the greatest generalities can be understood and covered. So let's not lose perspective on this prolific and highly creative author (let's remember the origin of the greguerías under his handwriting) who developed a profuse literary activity of unsurpassed quality.

How could it be otherwise, he wrote novels, essays, biographies, theater. A literary factotum that decidedly opted to soak up the avant-garde Spanish literature, trying to break with everything that supposed accommodation and conventionalism. For Gómez de la Serna, literature should always show itself as a cultural battering ram towards the social movement, since otherwise it could never serve the evolutionary cause of any society.

With his avant-garde spirit and also with his interest in introducing humor, so necessary for him, in many of his literary manifestations, Gómez de la Serna published countless books.

Top 3 best books by Ramón Gómez de la Serna

The incongruous

By definition, incongruity is the total lack of coherence between various ideas, actions, or things. Did Gómez de la Serna try to write an incongruous book? In form something like this could be understood, as the own Julio Cortazar he wanted to guess.

But at the same time, the incongruity points to the contradiction in essence, to that horizon that haunts us all within the natural variability of interests or even drives that move us over time, (even from today to tomorrow). And yet being incongruous in literature takes on a new value.

Because all that erratic universe of the human can find a reflection in this open and closed novel, with and without chronological reading.

Undoubtedly a different work endowed with magic, humor, a real world where things, our affairs are built between full subjectivity and an objectivity that perhaps does not exist and that justifies the most complete inconsistencies ...

Breasts

Yes, it is not another meaning of the term. We talk about breasts, about erotic suggestion. A writer convinced of the avant-garde as the natural channel of literature could not ignore eroticism in a society like that of Spain in which sexual liberation was still an extremely distant horizon.

With the controversy typical of this work, which reached the necessary work status with its prohibition during the dictatorship (this is what usually happens when totalitarianism tries to restrict culture, which in the end ends up giving even more echo to the work), Breasts has survived to this day as a necessary first point of contact with the most sinuous eroticism.

Because yes, it is a fetishistic work about female breasts, long adored in art and also exalted in this unique book.

Greguerías

On the greguerías there are many compilations. The traditional aphorisms that these creations represent rescue from the Spanish imaginary the sly point and the metaphorical capacity that ends up stripping or transforming everything.

In an author like Gómez de la Serna, a proactive writer, creator of social gatherings, you can understand this desire to find new airs in literature, transforming it into a brief and imaginative communication, a kind of memes of the moment, a social network in which anyone can sign up to narrate their own greguerías.

Although yes, as the creator of them, there is no one better than Gómez de la Serna to get a smile and a grimace of surprise at the brilliant metaphor.