Literature that raises tricks and tricks on the known. Lyrics loaded with satire or rampant surrealism for an increasingly tragically hyperreal world. What of Rodrigo Cortés It is that narrative of return of everything that sometimes even dresses in historical pharaohs to deconstruct History. More than anything to present a narrative menu of well-cooked events, to the point of how things should have been if the world was a slightly more comical place from its grotesque nature.
To have a laugh, to demystify myths or to expose patriotic feelings or other pantomimes on one or the other side of any river on which timeless discords run. Only in satire and nonsense there is also a trace of bitterness, of impossible reconciliation with the human, of acceptance of animosity as something inherent to the human ...
Although the writer lives not only on historical fictions. Because the present time also requires a good layout with which to make it bearable. And that there is no easy costume for both tailors without seams. To understand everything from the prism of the irrational (since things make little sense), it is best to indulge in unapologetic novels such as those of santiago lorenzo o Paul tusset. To cite some similarities with a Rodrigo Cortés who would close the perfect triangle with which to rediscover the most stunted truth in the world.
Top 3 recommended novels by Rodrigo Cortés
The extraordinary years
The word extraordinary always points to a threshold between the exceptionally good and what has gone completely out of hand to achieve complete fantasy. And that's what this novel is about, which borders on the impossible and the uchronies to present us with things as they should have happened if God played dice with fate and had a bad day in Las Vegas or at the neighborhood casino ...
The extraordinary years collects the memories of Jaime Fanjul, born in Salamanca in 1902 into a bourgeois family passionate about snakes, and proposes a Valleinclanesco journey through the XNUMXth century through his memories and travels. There is no fundamental key to the century that this prodigious novel does not evoke: from the arrival of the sea in Salamanca to the brief boom in cars driven by thought; from the terrible cruelty of the Portuguese prisons to the war of the Alicante against Spain (and the Dutch against the rest of the world); of the exploits of Miseno, a submarine ship that transports tunnels, to the unusual abilities of the Theosophists, capable of levitating a few centimeters above the saddle; from the face-down landing of man on the Moon to the change of location of the city of Paris in 1940.
In The Extraordinary Years there are children with ancient powers, slaves who terrorize their masters, ghosts in tailored clothes, eighty-year-old girls, Jews who change the weather, fist fights with brave nuns, workshops to spoil things ... Jaime Fanjul travels the world telling how much happens to him and how little he learns. Serious, observant, without complaint, he recalls his journey with unpredictable humor and poetic breath.
Sleeping is for ducks
Let's celebrate: at three it's two again! Rodrigo Cortés returns with a new selection of his memorable breverías, sharp, biting, deceptively light, sly, funny and always intelligent. In the tradition of the most ironic Ambrose Bierce and of Lichtenberg's sharpest anthologies, Dormir es de patos exudes a deaf disenchantment with reality that Rodrigo Cortés carries with enviable humor.
It is overflowing with criticism ("Many jobs are expendable, for example: those of others", "Who is the one who is falling?"); calls for attention ("Give me self-promotion!", "It's a shame you don't have to pay for your opinion"); poisoned darts ("Once I put the radio on in August, I don't like to talk about it", "I listen to stations with different tendencies to better establish my prejudices"); clarifications ("To suggest is to order softly", "The mind is a minefield, and, if not, it is an empty field"); winks at the cinema ("There are movies that see you", "Man, like the cinema, is astonishment and fright"), and a lot of jokes ("It's not alcoholism if you don't pay for yourself", "Little is recognized the contribution of the misses to world peace »). The lucid gaze of Rodrigo Cortés, which compresses the truth into pills full of brilliance to confront our absurdities, runs loose from page to page and makes one of his hand bombs explode every second. Is Rodrigo Cortés's delusion square or simply round? "Vitamin complexes" for everyone!
telluric tales
The stories that welcome us all as a species. The differential fact of the human began to emerge from an imagination in search of explanations that ended in myths, legends and many stories. Even today stories are necessary, but their nature has changed. They no longer explain anything because they know everything. Even though they are tremendously wrong.
Telluric Tales is an anthology of almost fantastic stories, or a collection of almost magical stories. In Telluric Tales there is room for venerable caliphs, reptilian men, clever girls, characters trapped within characters, letters from the future, circles in the grain fields, raging volcanoes, declarations of quantum love, cats, abductions, invisible emanations arising from the heart of the earth, giant squids, fables without morals, immaterial priests, women of time... Rodrigo Cortés demonstrates once again that, if reality and magic are not the same, they are, for his pen, indistinguishable.
Other recommended books by Rodrigo Cortés
It does matter how a man sinks
The paradox of the new rich who discover themselves incapable of governing their destiny, Half the fault of the Treasury (Who expected it?), and half the fault of the decisions that money forces like diabolical temptations. Wisps during which the world turns on its face. Until it is discovered that everything was a matter of Warhol's minutes of glory at the most expensive price in the world.
Martín Circo Martín wins the biggest prize ever awarded in the history of television: three million euros in apartments, suits, cars, works of art, electronic equipment ... and those Chinese balls that relax the Chinese and make the rest of the world nervous . But good luck can also be bad, and the prize activates an economic trap that throws Martín down a vertical highway to the most Kafkaesque of hell.
It does matter how a man sinks is a contemporary tragedy, a hilarious and ruthless satire on the financial machinery that crushes us and how a man's blood is not enough to pay off his debt, confirming Rodrigo Cortés as one of the feathers sharper, resourceful and acidic in recent years.
