There is some rabid sincerity in writers who do not maintain that regular cadence that every best-seller recommends. Because sometimes you have things to tell and other times you just don't. zarraluki He is one of those Guadianesco storytellers. An author who emerges when least expected to rescue good stories from the present on duty or from other times. Because of course, rest ensures depth or at least a greater load of essences from unsuspected phreatic levels, where the human soul passes in channel.
The question in the case of this Barcelona-born author is to observe his literary development with that taste for discovery. Because when you write if you have something to tell, your books end up composing independent symphonies. And only the creative imprint of its author manages to sustain the final reverberation from so many sources.
Stories from here and there, with evocations of the young author who discovers literature as an experiment and atonement. Or like that other writer who has already assumed the love-hate relationship with a literature that does not exorcise nor is it even a placebo, but that awakens that necessary spark of urgent life. That's why authors like him must write when they want and about what they want. The writers have no choice but to the superheroes dedicated to their mission with their everlasting conflicts...
Top 3 recommended novels by Pedro Zarraluki
The curve of oblivion
The perfect plans move like those perfect storms hidden behind gentle calm chichas. Because one thing is how you plan a few days off as a toast for friendship and quite another thing that ends up understanding that gamble that is fate to ruin everything.
In July 1968, Vicente Alós and Andrés Martel, two friends in their fifties, arrived in Ibiza by boat from Barcelona. Both are at a difficult time in their lives: Vicente has separated from his wife and Andrés has just become a widower. They are accompanied by their daughters, Sara and Candela, who despite having grown up together are very different from each other. Upon arriving on the island, they settle in a lonely hostel located in a secluded cove, and thus begins a long and seemingly peaceful summer.
But an absurd tragedy, old grudges and unresolved disagreements also travel with Vicente and Andrés. While they relive that past little by little, the young women will have to face the concerns of a future that, under the echoes of a troubled world, appears before them as an unfathomable abyss. The curve of oblivion delves into the problems, anguish and hopes of two generations who, at a different but crucial moment in their lives, face the traps and cravings of the passing of time.
A difficult assignment
In the immediate Spanish post-war period, when everything that makes up society crumbles and disappears, when all references have been lost, only the serenity and dedication of some people make life run its course. In A Difficult Task, the wife of an enemy of the uprising and her daughter are retaliated and sent to forced exile to the island of Cabrera where some small shacks, a canteen, a fisherman, a military detachment - alerted by the possible attack by the army English- and a German hermit form the succinct landscape of possible companions.
Meanwhile, in Mallorca, a man takes on the most unpleasant jobs in exchange for the authorities to forgive him for a murky past; this time we must end the life of a German spy who has betrayed the Third Reich and is hiding in Cabrera.
I wait for you inside
In the short stories the reasons for the writing of each author are discovered. Because in the characters of small lives faced with fleeting scenarios, those nuances of what each narrator looks for in their literature escape. Writing is another form of that long-awaited search that bases the rational and the human. In these stories we assume the few answers that remain ...
The characters in these stories do not know that they are being watched. A girl teaches her father to pretend to be asleep to escape dead-end situations; an old woman who watches television for the first time discovers with The Godfather the relationship between time and grasshoppers; the conversation between two brothers turns into a rebellion against the life that their father gave them; Sonia gulps down cans of condensed milk as a relief to a present that overflows her ...
And that's when the moment comes when something of vital importance is going to change for them, without even being aware of what is happening. Any of us, had we been observed in a moment of fragile intensity, could inhabit this book. With his characteristic humor and his finest elegance, and also with an inexhaustible tenderness, Pedro Zarraluki reveals the unexpected capacity of lives that seem to have hit rock bottom to resurface with imagination and regain their dignity.
