In the case of Carmen Maria Machado We can awaken a sensation of contrast between the literary genre and the narrative background. Because curiously Carmen is capable of choosing the most unsuspected fictional areas, and usually far from realism, to talk about very close aspects in our current society.
The thing is that it turns out well. Mainly, because few authors are capable of this exercise of synergy with which to ultimately propose disquisitions of all kinds with that metaphorical reading of fictions. Science fiction, suspense or even horror are spaces where Carmen displays that capacity for literary ambivalence.
But beyond what has been translated into Spanish so far by this American author, her references to Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez as a first-order reference, they make us suspect that there is also space in his bibliography for that narrative field of magical realism, where everything has a place if one knows how to reconcile the dreamlike or the fantasy with an absolutely tangible spatio-temporal location.
Top recommended books by Carmen MarÃa Machado
Your body and other parties
If recently I was talking about Argentina Samantha Schweblin As one of the great referents of the modern story, this time we climbed thousands of kilometers in the American continent to meet the American Carmen MarÃa Machado.
And at both ends of the most extensive of the continents we enjoy two vertiginous feathers, endowed with that special capacity of someone who indulges in the story and its transience as a narrative tool capable of suggesting or projecting in the magical synthesis of history and language.
In the case of this book His body and other parties, Carmen MarÃa approaches feminism with its necessary protest interest, marked above all from the physical and with an interesting surrealist point that arises from the integration of this conscientious intention with the natural propensity of an author usually embarked on fantastic stories or science fiction. Something like sequels free of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
The point is that in the conjunction of intentions, with the vibrant rhythm of the brief and its magical brightness of symbols that end up being the foundations of what is narrated, the reading advances with that taste of the harmonic when a volume of stories end up playing the same symphony .
Feminism from the paranormal, an undoubted reflection of the process of estrangement and alienation that accompanies the evolution of a society that promises integration of women but that, descending into the mud of reality, always ends up getting stuck in many puddles. Women in the midst of modern apocalypses, or like old biblical plagues, that is, nothing that does not come from their eternal assumption of their natural condition in the face of a world determined to renounce the feminine. Stories from beyond the grave for other women who seek impossible justice for their bodies occupied by the violence of a sex that, paradoxically, seeks the perpetuity of the species, according to moral canons. Extrasensory powers as feminine evolutions necessary to achieve the demands of their universe and that ultimately grant the gift of complete understanding of everything, even sexual matters.
Without forgetting an acid humor (the kind that ends up arousing disappointments after the first laugh), and with a novel intention of addressing the most intimate of women projected towards various fantasy assumptions, this volume of eight stories ends up composing an interesting feminism project . A feminism extended towards such atypical genres such as terror, fantasy, science fiction and with that residue of reflection that can always be extracted from a good work that wanders from the fertile imagination, but that makes use of its external focus to observe our world with greater perspective.
In the house of dreams
Or when literature is an act of bravery, an exposition of the damaged soul which ecce homo. We all end up making literature in the story of our lives insofar as our realities are almost completely subjective. The question is to know how to extract from that subjectivity the most objective notion, the one that tunes in with any other soul that essentially shares the ultimate truth of things.
When she was a young aspiring writer, Carmen Maria Machado met a petite, blonde, upper class, Harvard graduate, sophisticated and fascinating girl with whom she began her first lesbian relationship, after several sexual experiences with men. The girl owned an idyllic cabin in Bloomington, Virginia: the dream house of the title. But the dreams turned into nightmares when Machado's girlfriend began to be jealous, controlling and paranoid, to later accuse her of cheating on her with everyone and ending up verbally and even physically assaulting her.
This book is the testimony of a toxic relationship, which in this case does not have as its aggressor a heterosexual male with a patriarchal and macho mentality, but a lesbian. And this is a first element that gives value to the text: the denunciation of violence in the couple within the community queer. But the exceptional quality of Machado's proposal goes further: instead of remaining in a mere exercise of personal testimony, it uses the history lived - and suffered - to further explore the subject, playing literary games with it. And he does so through the manipulation of narrative genres - the romance novel, the erotic novel, the initiation novel, the horror novel ... - which allows him to tell his story and reflect on how we tell all of ours at the same time.
The result: a new sample of the immense and transgressive talent of Carmen Maria Machado, one of the most radical and lucid female voices on the contemporary literary scene, capable of combining formal exploration with absolute transparency in the story of lived experience and sexuality. . The book is a brilliantly seductive literary pirouette, as well as a testimony of overwhelming sincerity about emotional and physical abuse.
