It may be that a correspondent is a search for stories to tell for latent narrators. Cases like those of Mavi doñate, Olga Merino or even the first Perez Reverte. Any of them, and many others, have been responsible for bringing us chronicles from disparate places where first-rate news was happening.
Perhaps in parallel they took notes for stories to compose between chronicle and report. Or more in the long term, when journalistic performance leaves time to write in that other way, between what is lived and what is imagined, which is now literature.
And there is nothing better than traveling (let's forget about tourism and its mirages) to find without searching, to feed curiosity as long as one is not a recalcitrant ethnocentrist incapable of assuming differences. Because in the subsequent novels that may arrive, the setting may vary completely but the characters can be outlined from that approach to all types of cultures and ideologies. Idiosyncrasies from here and there.
Very different ways of seeing the world, and of moving through life. All references as support for the privileged writer who, as soon as he considers the first pattern of the character in question, has already made the suit for him...
In the case of Olga Merino we enjoy an intimate point, that existentialism of everyday life where the protagonists, their actions, their meditations and their dialogues awaken centripetal forces. In this way, he manages to make everything revolve around them, whether it is a plot with greater suspense or one that is overdue for the dramatic in a sense between the theatrical and the absolutely realistic. The point is that Olga Merino arrives. And that is the best a writer can aspire to.
Top 3 recommended novels by Olga Merino
the stranger
After a youth of excesses, Angie lives retired -almost entrenched- in a remote village in the south. For the neighbors, she is the crazy one who lets herself be seen in the company of her dogs. Her existence takes place in the old family mansion, in a continuous intersection of two times: the present and the past. She only has her ghosts and the memory of love lived with an English artist in Margaret Thatcher's forgotten London.
The discovery of the hanged body of the most powerful landowner in the shire leads Angie to unearth old family secrets and discover the fatal thread of death, misunderstanding and silence that unites everyone in the shire. Is it the isolation? Are they the walnut trees, which secrete a poisonous substance? Or perhaps the melancholy of the Hungarians, who arrived centuries ago with their trunks and violins? Angie knows that when you've lost everything, there's nothing they can take from you.
La forastera is a contemporary western set in the harsh territory of a forgotten Spain. A shocking and exciting story about freedom and the ability of human beings to resist.
Five winters
The cold war never quite ended and, through transformations, recovers its icy tension of national ice blocks as soon as any buried economic interest is awakened. Olga Merino was that reporter who brought us up to date on the life and work of that enemy of the West that was Russia, even though its union of republics had dissolved. Or perhaps that was precisely why she appeared more disturbing than ever in some form of unexpected revenge.
Either that or we really did see everything from this side of the story. Because certainly the bad guys are never completely bad, nor are the saviors of foreign countries philanthropists by definition. In those ideological situations, Olga would move during the 5 years beyond the rusty steel curtain.
In December 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union (which will be thirty years old in 2021), Olga Merino was packing her bags to settle in Moscow as a correspondent. Merino lived in the Russian capital for five winters, in the vortex of a change of era that also marked a before and after in her personal life.
This intimate diary of a young woman who, immersed in Russian culture, pursues the dream of being a writer, professional prestige as a journalist, and full and sublime love is recorded in the present moment, masterfully contrasting today's voice with that of that idealistic girl.
Dogs barking in the basement
After the death of his father, Anselmo remembers a life marked by the uprooting that takes place between the Morocco of the protectorate and Franco's Spain. From her beginnings in sex with a young Moroccan, the discovery of infidelity and living with a strange, almost magical sister, images and events alternate past and present and show the fracture between what the characters would have wanted to be and what they really are.
Anselmo joins a decadent variety troupe, a metaphor for a deranged Spain, and ends up living with his father, an old man with whom he shares the painful sensation of loss. The historical background, masterfully reflected by the author, reveals an underworld outside of official history, and the difficult apprenticeship of a homosexual man in a dark age.
