From the deepest part of life, where reality seems to dissolve into misty thresholds, Cristian Alarcón always found stories to tell us. First as a journalist and then as a narrator of fiction, or perhaps not so much of fiction but of profiles that are both close to us and that awaken in us that estrangement of the human as something remote, alien, unassumable by our reading consciousness and therefore transgressive in last instance.
In a bibliography that takes off towards those hybrid horizons of those who strive to be a writer without being able to give up the profession of journalist, as happened to Tom wolfe or many others, what happened with Alarcón will surely end up leading to an interesting literary career. And we will be here to tell it.
Top recommended novels by Cristian Alarcón
the third paradise
Life not only passes as frames shortly before the veil of the shocking final light (if something like that really happens, beyond famous speculations about the moment of death). In fact, our film assails us at the most unexpected moments. It can happen behind the wheel to draw us a smile for that fantastic day years ago, as perfect as it is idealized...
Our film finds us in blank moments, during routine tasks, in the middle of an inconsequential wait, shortly before sleep. And the same memory may have a revision of its script or a correction of the film's direction, with its seat somewhere in our mind.
Cristian Alarcón tells us about his protagonist's film in the most vivid and precious way possible. So that we can feel to the touch and even smell those evocations of life that was and the way of seeing life from that debt. To understand certain protagonists is to understand ourselves. That is why literature will always be necessary.
A writer cultivates his garden on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. That's where memories of his childhood in a town in southern Chile come, the stories of his ancestors, his grandmother, his mother. Also the exile to Argentina and how in that exile it is the women who plant the orchard, the gardens, solidarity, the collective.
A genderless, hybrid and poetic novel, to read The Third Paradise is to enter in an instant the universe of Cristian Alarcón, author of this literary, botanical and feminist journey that, far from exhausting itself on a first reading, asks us to return to the text in order to answer the many questions it poses.
“Set in various places in Chile and Argentina, the protagonist reconstructs the history of his ancestors, while delving into his passion for cultivating a garden, in search of a personal paradise. The novel opens a door to the hope of finding a refuge in the small in the face of collective tragedies.
When I die I want them to play me cumbia
Originally published back in 2003 and recovered for the cause of disseminating the work of an author who was finally awarded and recognized in more fair value. But also in the second place he revives the mythical character of "El Frente" Vital to whom Calamaro even dedicated one of his songs. With the chronicle as a background, we discover a work of contrasts as can already be guessed in the disparate concepts of the title. An outstanding story of that human context where vileness and greatness end up colliding and, as rarely, the latter emerges victorious.
«-His son is dead. There he is, don't touch him.
On the dirt floor Victor lay, with the wide, clean forehead that gave him his nickname, in a puddle of blood, under the table where they wrote the official report of his death.
On February 6, 1999, the death of a young boy, the Vital Front, riddled by the police, elevated to the category of myth that kind of Robin Hood of the town who distributed what he stole among the neighbors, and gave rise to to the saint capable of working miracles such as changing the fate of police bullets.
