The 3 best books by Manuel Longares

Few realistic writers end up respecting that label. Because what is collected in a narrative focused on the most tangible ends up shooting towards the most unsuspected assumptions. The trick, the perfect excuse to tell the unspeakable, the discordant, the anomalous and contradictory.

Because there is certainly little of realism in any account of the human. As much as we try. And you know it well Manuel Longares. Pretending to be realistic writers, they end up expressing illusions, emotions, desires, ideas marked by the future of the thinking character. A totum revolutum of subjectivities that range from touch to the psyche. The descriptiveness of a place as recurrent for the author as Madrid only sets the scene towards that fantasy, that illusion of what is experienced by characters in whom we can empathize precisely in their estrangement from the common.

But yes, it is ultimately about realism. Because there are no spaceships or fantastic characters. But it is precisely for that reason, because they are not necessary in the face of the extraordinary and magical coincidence that places us all in the world, with our novel in hand to tell...

Top 3 recommended novels by Manuel Longares

Romanticism

A title that is a paradoxical declaration of intentions by the author for a novel that ends up being brilliant as a musical composition at various times. Because sometimes the ideal remains romantic impossible due to circumstances, something worse than unrealizable love, unrealizable life.

In the bourgeois redoubt of the Madrid neighborhood of Salamanca, through three generations of a family marked by an unviable love, this novel tells us about some crucial years of Spanish life, after the death of the Caudillo and the political transformation that it entails.

That nothing changes or that everything turns around, is the issue that affects as a threat in that conservative neighborhood in which life is considered unalterable in its rites, customs and beliefs, and where the well-off discard any alternative.

Almost twenty years later, Galaxia Gutenberg recovers this novel, which won the National Critics Award, and which was already considered a masterpiece at the time. An essential novel, set in the wake of the best European narrative of the XNUMXth century. This edition includes a text by the author in which some keys to his creation are revealed.

Romanticism, by Manuel Longares

Absolute pitch

A writer knowingly writes about literature when he sees the seams in writing. During youth writing is a drive, a discovery, a passion. Little by little, writing becomes a placebo or an exorcism in the face of the pain that one feels while writing.

This is a novel about literature. About writers and preliterates, about the editor and the reader, about the scholar and the disciple, about the muses and the censors, about the mute and the loquacious, about bohemia and memoir manuscripts. About the greatness and misery of a job whose reward lies in dedicating oneself to words.

It happens in an era that encompasses the central part of the last century, with its civil war and its postwar period. It revolves around a village poet who lives in the capital with triumph, exile and madness. And the narration of the incident is supported by verses and prose by classical and contemporary authors and by fragments of zarzuela, musical magazine and copla.

The absolute ear, the eighth novel by Manuel Longares, presents a heroic, foolish and cruel world. The narrative development is a lot of fun, with substantially quirky characters. They are the cultivators of the literary heritage they inherited and who will entrust their descendants with libraries.

Absolute pitch

The naive

A particular narrative universe presented in a concise way. The future of a family saga overlooking the nearby splendor of other neighborhoods where everything happens as if in a distant, unattainable universe, despite being able to inhabit it, travel through it, almost feel it...

The universe of Madrid's Gran Vía has two sides: the bright one, full of cars and adorned with movie posters, and the less flourishing side streets, where life is active and bustling but without the pageantry of the main avenue. In this dull sector, in a cold gate on Infantas Street in Madrid, next to Gran Vía, live the protagonists of this novel, a family made up of a married couple and two children.

Within the framework of three historical moments, which function in the novel in the manner of three theatrical acts, the action unfolds. In the first episode, which takes place at the end of the XNUMXs, the father of the family has the possibility of working in the cinema as a screenwriter and that does not provide him with the benefits he dreamed of. In the second act, towards the sixties, it is the children of this marriage who begin their vital takeoff, the son inherits from his father the possibility of working in a movie as an actor and the daughter follows the ups and downs of a teacher older than her and former classical theater performer with whom he has fallen in love.

The third act takes place in November 1975, days before the Caudillo dies. In a Madrid disfigured by the fog and haunted by successive medical reports on the dictator's health, detailing the inexorable scrapping to which his body is subjected, the family of the doormen on Infantas Street undertake extravagant missions. These stories and these characters share one of the noblest and least valued qualities of the human being: naivety.

The military man Monterde, the priest Expósito, the sibylline Cárdenas, the dogmatic Beni, the prostitute Engracia, Trinidad of the cats or the afflicted innkeeper of Bacchus come into life unarmed of strategies and suffer the intemperate reaction of their environment. In this disturbing, sentimental and funny novel, where illusion is the inseparable companion of failure, beings exalted by baseless chimeras refuse hopelessness.

The naive
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