Any investigation in pursuit of a story can lead to its fictional version or a more chronic option. In the end, everything is a task of gathering information to which the narrator on duty gives that opportune form to bring us closer to the current scenario. In the case of Ana Canil sometimes the gathering of information breaks towards the journalistic or towards an essay.
While on other occasions that novel stands out that somehow sublimates the facts towards a kind of narrative catharsis. A melting pot between reality and fiction where the intrahistory is developed to a greater extent towards that mimicry with a time or circumstances. Without a doubt, when the most human deepening is sought, nothing better than fiction with its capacity to inhabit souls in transition through the scene of events.
Be that as it may, this seems to be a journalistic duality that curiously is reproduced to a greater extent in cases of authors such as Ana Cañil, pillar eyre o Snow Blacksmith. Journalists all capable of that ambivalence from a language made professional tool with unsuspected paths.
Top 3 recommended books by Ana R. Cañil
foreign lovers
The charm of what is close is blurred from the everyday, from that familiarity that wears away, from that walk that does not observe beyond the ground or from the assumption of the distant and the exotic as more deserving of our recognition. So there is nothing better than turning to others who precisely see this country as an exotic place to retrace prejudices and relearn how to appraise what is closest to you.
The journalist Ana Cañil takes an intimate, beautiful and exciting journey through some of the most emblematic places in our country (The Alhambra, El Escorial, the Paseo del Prado or the Camino de Santiago, among others) hand in hand with great foreign travelers who visited us and expressed their enormous love for Spain, also bathed in indifference and contempt for our contradictions.
This book, which was born from the desire to keep astonishment alert in the face of beauty, collects looks that surprise and illustrate and that sometimes also hurt, but that do not leave indifferent. Traveling through XNUMXst-century Spain hand in hand with enlightened non-Spanish is a delightful adventure as well as irritating and malicious.
If at three years I have not returned
Sometimes essay or disclosure. But also at some point everything implodes to unify into a single channel with more personalized dyes where the subjective component is discovered as that great novel loaded with the truest epic...
Some time ago, journalist Ana R. Cañil began to track a terrible story: that of post-war prisoners whose children were taken from them by their jailers to be placed in seminaries and convents or given up for adoption. A cruel practice that found its justification? In pseudoscientific theories, typical of totalitarian regimes and defended without fissures by renowned doctors, religious people and legislators of the time.
Here was material for a magnificent essay. But the author could not avoid an emotional approach, like the one she already undertook in The woman of the maquis, although, in this case, with much more narrative ambition. The result of their effort is a novel that is impossible to put down, not only because of the terrible fact that it denounces, but because of the way in which that fact is embodied in two unforgettable antagonists: Jimena Bartolomé, the young wife of a communist, and María Topete, the director of the Ventas women's prison.
The courage of Miss Redfield
One cold morning in January 1962, Elsa Redfield, a young Englishwoman who has been hired as a nanny for the youngest of the aristocrat's grandchildren.
Austere, competent and capable, Miss Redfield comes to Madrid with a mission: to meet her old friend and mentor, Miss Hibbs, nanny of Franco's grandchildren, to whom he brings a message and a ring of incalculable value. Elsa will have to put her prudence to the test, because, despite herself, she will be involved in the affairs of the Peñalara, a family that, under its dazzling appearance, hides terrible wounds that, without knowing it, the young and inexperienced nanny is about to to bring to light with unsuspected consequences.
