The 3 best books by Gabriela Wiener

An editor once commented to me that to write well you need two things. In the first place, not exempt from sarcasm, it indicated that you had to know how to write. In the second instance, you had to really write. The first thing for him was almost like a gift, like a virtue brought in the genes. Regarding the second, he meant that you cannot be squeamish thinking about what they will say to characterize the character in one way or another or to approach a scene in any way.

Gabriel Weener it covers both aspects with the assurance of knowing how to write well and wanting to write for real. Hence, giving verisimilitude to what happens in his novels with tints of biography or reports, it comes for granted. Only in this way can it be narrated freed from everything, with a firm narrative pulse and a course of lacerating events even according to what morals.

But it is that literature is moving or succumbing to hackneyed formulas. In the alternation between all kinds of literatures is grace. And certainly only from a vision between tragic and comic of life, depending on the moment of the protagonist on duty who occupies this world, can joy and sadness coexist over the absurdity of everything.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Gabriela Wiener

Lost call

A missed call always points to something important that is left unsaid. We call back in the hope that it is not too late to get the message yet. This is the missed call of an author eager to awaken consciences with insistent ringtones.

Gabriela Wiener writes about who she is and what she lives, and she does so with surprising language and sincerity. In these autobiographical stories full of irony and humor, he invites us to immerse ourselves in the world and the gaze of a woman who fights against her daily demons. It addresses topics such as emigration, motherhood, fear of death, the loneliness of hotel rooms, ugliness, threesomes, the mysterious number eleven, the distance from friends ...

The day to day appears as a complex and rich whole ready to reveal itself immediately. 'Not only do I get into spaces or situations in the true style of gonzo journalism, but I reveal my fears, my shortcomings, my biases and limitations. I'm not afraid of stopping the story of what I see to do it […]. I think the most honest thing I can do in literary terms is to tell things as I see them, without artifice, without disguises, without filters, without lies, with my prejudices, obsessions and complexes, with truths in lowercase and generally suspicious. '

Nine moons

When Confucius approached his book of mutations, he could never imagine what a woman can tell about truly mutating, adjusting her body and her emotions to the fact of going through a period like pregnancy where everything changes forcefully in such a process. magical from the human as epic from the experiences of women.

They say that morning sickness is the answer to the emotional black hole that opens when you know that you will be a mother. When Gabriela Wiener found out at the age of thirty, she reacted like a good kamikaze chronicler and launched herself to explore the gravitational force of pregnancy: there is no more "gonzo" experience than pregnancy.

Wiener always digs where few want to look and shares his findings without shame or bragging. In this uninhibited journey through the caves of pregnancy and motherhood, matter expands and doubts lurk: can maternal love be able to do everything? What am I doing here, what do I expect from all this? What makes someone yearn to become in mother?

This reading is a delivery without anesthesia, a story against the kitsch and frivolization that drug pregnant women before the "miracle of life." There is no magic or syrup here; there is pornography, abortions, small apartments and a young mother who fights against precariousness far from her country. Because this is also the story of a migrant who arrived in Spain without anyone caring about what she had achieved in the southern hemisphere.

Ten years have passed since its publication and Nine moons it continues to be a testimony that combines like few others the terror, the beauty and the paradoxes of the propagation of the species. In this revised and expanded edition, the author addresses a letter to her children to tell them how much everything has changed and how many things unfortunately never change.

Huaco portrait

A huaco portrait is a piece of pre-Hispanic ceramic that sought to represent indigenous faces with the greatest possible precision. It is said that it captured the soul of people, a record that has survived hidden in the broken mirror of the centuries.

We are in 1878, and the Jewish-Austrian explorer Charles Wiener is preparing to be recognized by the academic community at the World's Fair in Paris, a great fair of "technological progress" that has among its attractions a human zoo, the culmination of scientific racism and the European imperialist project. Wiener has been close to discovering Machu Picchu, he has written a book about Peru, he has taken close to four thousand huacos and also a child.

One hundred and fifty years later, the protagonist of this story walks through the museum that houses the Wiener collection to recognize herself in the faces of the huacos that her great-great-grandfather plundered. With no more baggage than the loss or any other map than his open wounds, the intimate and the historical ones, he pursues the traces of the family patriarch and those of the bastardy of his own line -which is that of many-, the search for identity of our time: an archipelago of abandonment, jealousy, guilt, racism, ghostly vestiges hidden in families and the deconstruction of a desire stubbornly anchored in a colonial thought. There is trembling and resistance in these pages written with the breath of someone who picks up the pieces of something that was broken long ago, hoping that everything will fit again.