Michel Moutot's best books

Practicing a literature on the threshold of the most palpable realism, travel books and adventure fiction, Michel Moutot it is a kind of mixture. On the one hand traveling evocations of the already disappeared Javier Reverte French-style, in its strictly narrative aspect, with drops of historian and seasoned all with a point of historical fictions. Or at least that is his writing side made known in his publications in Spanish.

The point is that it is not that we know a Moutot who is rooted in the history of France, but rather he is in charge of narrating odysseys to the other side of the world. There where History is more recent, where the current empire of the United States began to project itself from the conquest of lands of its mestizo citizens.

The result, at least as I say in that aspect of translation into Spanish, is a bibliography of the historical seen almost from the anthropological point of view. A mixture of plot and report, a kind of journalism dating back to recent times in the deepest North America.

Top 3 recommended novels by Michel Moutot

The cathedrals of heaven

The history of New York can be told from a multitude of prisms, beyond its natural miscegenation between immigrants from very different places. The city itself, its physiognomy and its final definition as a mega-city of gigantic buildings that shelters the dreams of prosperity of half the world can be reduced to its buildings, how and who raised them.

The grace always resides in the way of telling things. We start from the recent past, from the gloomy 11/2001 of the year XNUMX. The foundations of the West shook together with those of the twin towers. That is where the author introduces his first character, who will give way to a family saga, all of them relevant to the physical construction of skyscrapers. The character is none other than John LaLiberté, who saw the Twin Towers collapse quickly came to try to help in the rescue efforts.

Who is John LaLiberté? His father, Jack LaLiberté, participated in the construction of the same towers back in 1968… The NY skyline begins to be understood as a drawing outlined by the LaLiberté family. But, the most curious thing is that the surname LaLiberté is a particular translation of other much more tribal surnames. Both John and Jack have Mohawk blood, from the nearby area of ​​Canada, on the other side of Lake Ontario, where Toronto and Buffalo look at each other in the fascinating mirror of Niagara Falls.

The Canadian Mohawk reservation underwent a particular revolution in 1886 when young people were offered metal work to build a railway line between Canada and the United States. The young apprentices could not even remotely imagine that, thanks to their hard work and bravery, they would end up shuttering many of the buildings in thriving New York.

So New York, its skyline and its current charm, owes a debt to those brave Indians who climbed to the top without any fear. At least this book will serve for a reconnaissance that reaches up to the current Freedom Tower that occupies the once sinister zone 0.

The port of gold

In the past, the American dream was “simply” the conquest of territory through savage colonization. The resources were there for those who ventured to carve out a life sprinkled with myths about the riches of a land where it seemed that some kind of manna of golden brilliance and the taste of blood was springing up.

When he was just a child, Mercator Fleming embarked on a whaler following the family tradition. Just as his people expected, there he became a man and became an expert sea wolf, at the cost of losing his innocence. However, upon his return, the death of his father and the avalanche of debts incurred by him force him to change his destiny.

Attracted by the news of the gold rush that reaches them from the west coast of the United States, he and his brothers decide to take a turn in their lives and set off by sea to the impressive redwood forests of California. After six months of intense maritime odyssey aboard the Freedom, Mercator finally reaches that promised land that holds nuggets of pure gold in its entrails.

San Francisco has grown from a small town on the bay to a lawless city marked by violence, gambling and alcohol. The young Mercator must decide between joining the multitude of men who dedicate their lives in search of that long-awaited golden vein or find another way to carve out that future with which he dreamed before leaving the port of Nantucket, a path that will lead him to live off gold without having to find it.

Love, ambition, sibling rivalry and adventure come together in this splendid historical novel that takes us to a time where gold was the only law, justice was shot and only the bravest managed to survive.

The port of gold
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