Sometimes an argument, a plot involves revisiting scenarios of reality from a necessarily uncomfortable, disturbing, unsettling prism. There is no realism without that cut beyond the average, of normality. Because on many occasions fiction surrounds us, even more so today, in the form of social networks, posturing and other hyperboles of happiness.
That is why it is even more interesting that it is a young author like Emma Cline who dares to tell us things, her things, under that prism of almost visceral authenticity, an intimate chronicle that gives meaning to everything because it brings us closer to individual universes from foci that they go from the inside out.
After her emergence and explosion in world literature, Emma takes that witness that is not always easy to live to tell it more than to tell what it is not to try to live it. An exercise in survival, exorcization, liberation and awareness. Yes, all of that can be literature like this author's. Because to move is not only to invite the sentimental, but to show crudeness that achieves that internal movement, that awakening of the narcotic reality towards realism capable of explaining many things...
Top 3 recommended books by Emma Cline
the girls
An old friend, in some childhood day, was shocked by my manifest admiration for the lifestyle of some hippies who passed through town. The reality was undoubtedly different and that 12-year-old boy already preferred his house with his pool in Malibu. But the magnetism was there in an awakening of childhood that pointed to that discontent with society, with formulas that screeched before the most open (and surely candid) vision of the world... If I had read this book before, I would surely have understood everything before .
California. Summer 1969. Evie, an insecure and lonely teenager about to enter the uncertain world of adults, notices a group of girls in a park: they dress carelessly, go barefoot and seem to live happy and carefree. margin of the rules. Days later, a fortuitous encounter will cause one of those girls, Suzanne, a few years older than her, to invite her to accompany them.
They live on a lonely ranch and are part of a commune that revolves around Russell, a frustrated musician, charismatic, manipulative, leader, guru. Fascinated and perplexed, Evie plunges into a spiral of psychedelic drugs and free love, mental and sexual manipulation, which will cause her to lose touch with her family and the outside world. And the drift of that commune that becomes a sect dominated by a growing paranoia will lead to an act of brutal, extreme violence.
This novel is the work of a debutante who, given her youth, has left critics speechless due to the unusual maturity with which she carves out the complex psychology of her characters. Emma Cline builds an exceptional portrait of adolescent fragility and the stormy process of becoming an adult. It also addresses the issue of guilt and the decisions that will mark us all our lives. And it recreates those years of peace and love, of hippie idealism, in which a dark, very dark side germinated.
The author is freely inspired by a famous episode of the American black chronicle: the massacre perpetrated by Charles Manson and his clan. But what interests her is not the figure of the demonic psychopath, but something much more disturbing: those angelic girls who committed a heinous crime and yet did not lose their smile during the trial. About them, what led them to cross the limits? What were the consequences of acts that will always persecute them? This dazzling and disturbing novel deals with them.
Harvey
An alternative plot, perhaps an uchrony. We delve into the mind of one of the most reviled characters in recent Hollywood...
Twenty-four hours after the sentence of his trial, in a borrowed house in Connecticut, Harvey wakes up at dawn sweaty and restless, but full of confidence: this is America, and in America those who are like him are not condemned. There was a time when people turned their backs on him, but those people were soon replaced by new people: and the people who owed him favors, Harvey thinks, are still going to have to pay them back.
They have tried to destroy his reputation, but they have not succeeded, and that same day fate tells him how to finish restoring it; the familiar face of your next door neighbor turns out to be that of the writer Don DeLillo, and Harvey already imagines the neons: Background noise, the inadaptable novel, made into a film at last; the perfect alliance between ambition and prestige put at the service of his return. And yet, the passing of the hours soon begins to fill with disturbing, ominous signs; of deepening cracks in the trust with which Harvey had woken up...
With her usual psychological subtlety, Emma Cline tells this story from the most uncomfortable place: from the mind of a Harvey (Weinstein, of course) for whom surnames are not necessary, and who is portrayed here as someone fragile and needy, who overvalues his intelligence and exhibits ridiculous megalomania; a man completely detached from a reality, that of his condemnation, which is becoming more and more terrifyingly visible, and in which assumptions of a guilt that his conscious self denies seep through.
Avoiding the most recurrent angles of a theme that is often illuminated in a single light, resorting to injections of dull humor and taking advantage of the kaleidoscopic possibilities of the interactions between the characters with sharpness and without underlining, Emma Cline builds with Harvey a chamber piece by Turns penetrating, funny and disturbing, revealing his ability for a distance, that of the nouvelle, that he had not explored until now.
Popes
The American dream melts like a sugar in the sum of lives that make up that frenetic evolution towards success or failure capable of leaving you helpless in a society of brutal competitiveness. Accepting the price to pay, everyone does their tightrope walking exercises to avoid falling and reaching the other side thinking that this small success is worth it, even to look out to see who falls...
In the meantime of the crudest survival, philias and phobias that grow like dark flowers in the shadow of that glorious and longed-for awakening. I have always thought that the Made in USA society is a vein in the portrait of its characters, Emma embroiders it on this occasion, happy despite everything for the powerful mosaic achieved.
Ten stories from the author of the successful novel The Girls, which delve into the darkest corners of family relationships, sexuality and the culture of fame.
An aspiring actress who works as a clothing store clerk discovers an alternative way to make a living selling something very intimate online; a father goes to his son's school to pick him up after a violent incident that could cost him expulsion; a nanny for a famous actor's family tries to sneak past the paparazzi after being embroiled in a scandal; a girl in rehab gets into internet chat rooms where obscene photos are exchanged; an editor works for a millionaire who is writing his memoir; a Christmas family reunion is engulfed in mounting tension over shadows of the past; A father attends the premiere of his son's unfortunate film...
Emma Cline brilliantly portrays everyday situations of characters facing their demons, situations that overcome them, realities that they would not like to have to face... These stories confirm the author as an essential voice in current American literature.
