The American Emma cline has come from the hand of its characters to offer a rabidly empathetic literature with which to conquer half the world, waiting for the other medium to be captivated by its fierceness made into prose. And it is not that it is a narrative magic formula. The question is to give that truth to the people who inhabit the scenes, from the protagonist to the last gesture of the most inconsequential character in the development of the plot.
Perhaps it is the sign of the times and of its new chroniclers..., a literature soaked in that first-person vision of life that goes from the initial posture to the delving into the deepest motives of being. Something like what everyone shows on their social networks, only with the priceless debt of ending up teaching everything in an inalienable inertia, in a centripetal force in which telling our world ends up being literary reality.
And it's not that Emma is talking to us about Instagram or Facebook. Nothing could be further from her intention. But this free interpretation serves to offer that glimpse of the way of embodying its characters devoured by the imperative of plots determined to tell everything. We go from feeling the most unfathomable sexual drive to the ultimate, most paralyzing fear. Everything perfectly manifested in a gesture, in an expression, in a phrase that captures our soul due to that magical precision of someone who finds the right words in the face of the infinity of any abyss or black hole.
Top recommended books by Emma Cline
girls
That every libertarian movement has its dark side is something naturally acceptable, considering human nature in constant internal struggle between good and evil. From communism to hippies, everything was sold as a challenge to what was established in pursuit of the common good. Until idealization and utopia end up colliding with the most disturbing reality.
California. Summer 1969. Evie, an insecure and lonely teenager about to enter the uncertain world of adults, notices a group of girls in a park: they dress sloppily, go barefoot and seem to live happily and carefree, while margin of the norms. Days later, a fortuitous encounter prompted one of those girls - Suzanne, a few years older than her - to invite her to join them.
They live on a lonely ranch and are part of a commune that revolves around Russell, a frustrated musician, charismatic, manipulative, leader, guru. Fascinated and perplexed, Evie plunges into a spiral of psychedelic drugs and free love, mental and sexual manipulation, which will cause her to lose touch with her family and the outside world. And the drift of that commune that becomes a sect dominated by a growing paranoia will lead to an act of brutal, extreme violence.
This novel is the work of a debutante who, given her youth, has left critics speechless due to the unusual maturity with which she carves out the complex psychology of her characters. Emma Cline builds an exceptional portrait of adolescent fragility and the stormy process of becoming an adult. It also addresses the issue of guilt and the decisions that will mark us all our lives. And it recreates those years of peace and love, of hippie idealism, in which a dark, very dark side germinated.
The author is freely inspired by a famous episode in the American black chronicle: the massacre perpetrated by Charles Manson and his clan. But what interests her is not the figure of the demonic psychopath, but something much more disturbing: those angelic girls who committed a heinous crime and yet, during the trial, did not lose their smile. What led you to push the limits? What were the consequences of actions that will always haunt them? This dazzling and disturbing novel is about them.
Harvey
An author like Cline comes out openly for controversy. And deep down, literature needs this type of narration, something like the Virginie Despentes Yankee. Both women who take the baton of the most vindictive literature from the moral pinch or the bite in search of blood.
Twenty-four hours after the sentence of his trial, in a borrowed house in Connecticut, Harvey wakes up at dawn sweaty and restless, but full of confidence: this is America, and in America those who are like him are not condemned. There was a time when people turned their backs on him, but those people were soon replaced by new people: and the people who owed him favors, Harvey thinks, are still going to have to pay them back.
They have tried to destroy his reputation, but they have not succeeded, and that same day fate tells him how to finish restoring it; the familiar face of your next door neighbor turns out to be that of the writer Don DeLillo, and Harvey already imagines the neons: Background noise, the unadaptable novel, made a film at last; the perfect alliance between ambition and prestige at the service of his return. And yet, the passing of the hours soon begins to fill with disturbing, ominous signs; deepening cracks in the confidence with which Harvey had dawned ...
With her usual psychological subtlety, Emma Cline tells this story from the most uncomfortable place: from the mind of a Harvey (Weinstein, of course) for whom surnames are not necessary, and who is portrayed here as someone fragile and needy, who overvalues ​​his intelligence and exhibits ridiculous megalomania; a man completely detached from a reality, that of his condemnation, which is becoming more and more terrifyingly visible, and in which assumptions of a guilt that his conscious self denies seep through.
Avoiding the most recurrent angles of a theme often illuminated by a single light, resorting to injections of a dull humor and taking advantage of the kaleidoscopic possibilities of the interactions between the characters with insight and without underlining, Emma Cline constructs with Harvey a penetrating, funny and disturbing turn-based camera piece, revealing his knack for a distance, that of the new, that I hadn't explored so far.
