The 3 best books by Aurora Venturini

That to be a writer you have to be well read is shown by the figure of Aurora venturini. Because the budding storyteller who devoted herself to literature in her role as translator ended up writing that great work when her days were already pale. Which also proves something else; that one can decide to be a writer whenever he wants, at twenty or at eighty-five. The point is to have collected enough readings to know how to tell what comes intensely from within.

Inspiration of another famous author from Argentina as she is Mariana Enriquez, to which I would surely transfer that notion of literature as estrangement, as a distorting mirror, where everyone can observe themselves with that curiosity of depersonalization, fear or laughter.

But even manifesting himself as a novelist at such a late age, the truth is that Venturini had already broken into his own lyrics beyond translations. At the time she was poetry and from the remote verses of her youth a different writer ended up arriving, not as recognized as other great writers in Spanish, but loaded with meaning and narrative excellence.

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Aurora Venturini

The cousins

When you wait so long to write your first novel in black and white, the past comes over you like a sticky summer storm. Only this time everything is for the best. Because in the tortuous return to what Aurora Venturini left behind in her old homeland, the images arrive with an unexpected intensity, with humor and melancholy in a strange juicy and disconcerting cocktail.

Four women eternally orbiting in the void. The award-winning first novel of the octogenarian Aurora Venturini. Initiation story set in the 1940s that unfolds the tortuous world of a dysfunctional lower-middle-class family from the city of La Plata. Halfway between the delusional autobiography and the impudent exercise of intimate ethnography, Las prima is a unique and original novel, with a prose that endangers all the conventions of literary language.

If the story that this shocking novel by Aurora Venturini tells were set in Texas, it would surely have in it murderous psychopaths, guts and blood in abundance. This is not the case, fortunately for the readers, despite the fact that within the family that stars in it there are murderers - and murders -, prostitutes, cover-ups, mentally retarded and a dwarf. Also a fine arts teacher, a gifted student and a mother teacher.

Aura Venturini dissects the society of her youth, in La Plata (Argentina) in the forties, a family made up of women and totally dysfunctional that shows an amazing ability to get ahead, to the point that the protagonist manages to become a famous painter. Yuna, the narrator, recounts in the first person the years of training and self-improvement, with a corrosive sense of humor and without mincing words. The cousins it supposed the discovery and the consecration of its author, at the age of eighty-five years: certainly, it is never too late if the novel is good. In this case it is excellent.

Las amigas

If you were left with the desire by reading the premiums, in this new installment you will enjoy a calmer perspective of the "living" of its protagonists.

The young painter Yuna Riglos, the protagonist of Las prima, returns as a woman of almost eighty years of age who delights in the reminiscences of a successful past and in a loneliness interrupted by misunderstandings that she qualifies as friendship. They are the "friends" who knock on the door of her apartment in La Plata, and Yuna shares with them what she has and what she lacks. But it will be difficult to find feelings of friendship in this choreography of lonely women mobilized by the search for a little affection.

"A novel against the grain of good intentions: neither old age nor sisterhood are simple scenarios to inhabit," writes Liliana Viola in the prologue to this edition. However, Aurora Venturini, true to her style, manages once again to tighten the lines between fiction and delusion, and treasures the old age of an extravagant, selfish and unconventional Yuna. Las amigas is the unpublished novel by Aurora Venturini, a monologue that she begins to write after the success of Las prima and on which she continued to work for years. Tusquets Editores recovers the work of one of the fundamental narrators of contemporary literature.

The rails

The story is onamism for the writer but possible orgasm for the reader. Because brevity drags you like a sea undertow as you write while it rocks you on waves out to sea when you read it. The portraits of Aurora Venturini have that I don't know what small immortality between decadence and the glory of mere existence. With touches between fantastic and dreamlike, each story is that walk along the path of everything that can happen in that short period of time. Because if not, otherwise, why would it be counted?

"Variations on Monsieur Le Diable" is the title of one of the chapters of this moving book, in which Aurora Venturini stands firmly on the thin line between sleep and wakefulness, between madness and reason, or rather, between life and death, to relate those abysmal moments of his extraordinary existence in which he felt that his time to leave this world had come. And yet, fighting, with words as the main weapon, here he is, aged 90, demonstrating why his writing (which is the same as saying his life) can face Monsieur Le Diable and win the game.