The 3 best books by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

In the case of Gonzalo Torrente Ballester we find ourselves before one of the last great literary chroniclers of our recent history of the twentieth century, along with Miguel Delibes placeholder image. Probably the taste for narrating the intrahistory of Spain was born with Benito Pérez Galdós. His will as a writer committed to an almost journalistic narrative offered a parallel and sometimes alternative vision of what happened officially, an intention that penetrated both Delibes and Torrente Ballester.

Thus, we reach our days with the reference of these three authors, for me in charge of exhaustively narrating the experiences of the people, the past events from the ultimate truth of the people who passed through a country in continuous conflict, but always governed by an iron morality from the religious to the political.

Focusing on Torrente Ballester, the indicated level of commitment is discovered in its extensive bibliography of around 50 books, somewhat lower than the monstrous Delibes and Galdós. In any case, his work continues to maintain that notion of encyclopedic literature where to find a multitude of microcosms, intrahistories, and obvious truths that occurred in this old Iberian peninsula.

If anything, it must be said that Torrente Ballester, in my opinion, looks more at the character, at the psychology, at the vital perspective of its protagonists determined to reveal their successes and their shipwrecks in the gray worlds of the civil war, or the period between the wars, or the 1930s... A very intelligent way of relating what happened from the personal impressions of its characters. Perhaps a manifest intention to show the subjective nature of his proposal, avoiding indoctrinating wills.

Top 3 recommended novels by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

The cum and the shadows

One of those indelible titles of the popular imagination. If it wasn´t the book, it was the series, but almost all of us who occupy an important time in our lives in the XNUMXth century know what the matter is about… Pueblanueva del Conde like any other town in Spain.

A place overlooking the Cantabrian Sea and suspended in time, as isolated from any chronological advance, as scary in the face of change and assuming its destiny of work and adoration of the owner.

But the winds of change always end up blowing anywhere, even more so in those ominous 30s. The old empire of power of the Deza against the burgeoning new rich of the Salgado.

A conflict that the people long for so that everything follows its customary paths. But even the souls of the people, of those who once held power, can be subjected to new winds.

Pueblanueva then becomes a strange carnival where everyone lives their masquerade between appearances and passions, between greed and hope, between hatred and uncontrollable love ...

The cum and the shadows

Chronicle of the stunned king

To be so astonished, the truth is that the thirty bastard children accused of Felipe IV could suppose that half of Spain has blue blood today ...

The point is that Torrente Ballester looked at this king to build a humorous novel about a historical period of baroque Spain in the seventeenth century that showed that slyness is a type of humor of Hispanic patent.

Among so many extramarital sexual ventures with women who wore their bodies with naturalness and ease, Felipe IV considered that seeing his wife naked should not be such an esoteric matter. And so he did see everyone in his court.

And so it ended up reaching all the subjects of the old kingdom. The ins and outs for Felipe IV to achieve his desire become an entire odyssey through which the reader is led between fascination, surprise, humor and bewilderment ...

Chronicle of the stunned king

Philomeno, in spite of me

It was 1988 and this novel became the Planeta prize, acquiring for me the reconciliation value between the new narrative of the late XNUMXth century and the glory of the great chroniclers such as Torrente Ballester or the aforementioned Delibes and Pérez Galdós.

On many occasions it is said that the name marks. That your parents can play with your future by naming you, there is no doubt. And so it is with Filomeno, who seeks his life outside of Spain while the Civil War unfolds.

Upon returning to Spain, it is all of Europe that looks into the abyss and he, a gray and insecure guy, seems to carry on his back the tragedy that he always leaves behind.

Filomeno's experiences are recounted as the personal vicissitudes of a singular type extrapolated to any person who lived in the 20th century, while the world seemed like it was going to completely bleed to death.

Between sadness, insecurities and a certain comic touch, meeting Filomeno is going through history with that intention of chronicling the detail, of summing up experiences towards the ultimate idea of ​​the dislocation of the human being in the face of a changing world that is always looming over the horizon. tragic.

Philomeno, in spite of me
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