In every creative field we can always find these explorer authors, especially gifted geniuses who also dedicate themselves to the cause of innovating, searching, planning new spaces and opening creative paths. The Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares he was one of those spirits touched by intelligence and muses, all stirred up with creative restlessness to finally present a cocktail of a multitude of literary aromas.
When someone like Bioy Casares pulls resources as varied as parody, the detective genre, humor, fantasy or science fiction, almost always closed around an existentialism that ends up being tragicomic, there is certainly no choice but to surrender to that dominance of such varied styles for the greater glory of twentieth century literature.
Because even in the fantastic or the parody, a real reflection always emerges, a transformative intention that, thanks to estrangement, invites us to rethink any general ideology or any normally assumed aspect of the social, the political and of course the existential.
Its well-known pairing with Borges He ended up illuminating a set of four-handed works that dazzled in that communion between instinctive and exploratory literature with the symbolic and intellectual literature of the other Argentine genius. Extraordinary tales, as they came to title one of their collaborations, that plunged into the fantastic as if it were a kind of magical realism endowed with greater freedom, with fewer fundamental restrictions.
In short, a writer who alone occupies a large space in XNUMXth century Spanish literature.
Top 3 recommended books by Adolfo Bioy Casares
The sueño de los heroes
Fantasy, touched by an author such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, a down-to-earth, existentialist guy, deep in his way of narrating his different detective or even science fiction novels, ends up endowing this specific literary work with a singular nature to halfway between estrangement and melancholy.
Among the low neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, back in 1927, the days of carnival are a festivity to which Emilio Gauna and his friends indulge, young people who, lacking the power to take on the world, devour the night accompanied by alcohol.
The fantasy that surrounds this novel sometimes seems like a delirium of so much alcoholic excess, but at the same time it becomes a powerful memory rooted in disturbing certainty. What Emilio Gauna ended up seeing those nights of pagan celebrations will lead him three years later in his search for it, repeating similar patterns, waiting for the magic to respond as a déjá vù of what he had certainly experienced.
Emilio knows that his fantasy can lead him to other options, other lives, away from the people who prevent him from taking off from this world. On the other side of the opportunities that await, he will find Clara, completely given over to him. Every transcendent journey entails its risks.
Any idea that reality can be transformed by fiction can end up dragging you out of that real world. But Emilio is willing to pay the price, even if the ideal can only be a smokescreen in the end.
What's more, the risks inherent in that conquest of the fantastic, such as an opportunity to rebuild his life at will, can end him before even knowing what may or may not be true in those types of dreams that you seem to touch. moments after coming out of a dream.
The perjury of the snow
A police story about the murder of young Lucía that becomes a paradoxical tale of evil. It is not exactly the author's most extensive work, but due to the particular circumstances in which I read it, I rescue it as one of those readings that resonate with a special moment.
The journalist and the poet, two guys who meet and whose presence points to the guilt of one or the other. The poet may seek in that death a kind of fatalistic conclusion to his darkest poet, the one who gives him the possibility of becoming a creator and at the same time judge of life. The journalist who is after him, suspecting that behind him he may find the news of the day, the dark event.
What is unleashed from the meeting of the two characters points to an entire society on a scale reflected in Patagonia. Lucía is the daughter of a potentate and her death marks a before and after for life in that unique environment. The defragmented composition of the story gives it an air that points to the strange, the fantastic, even...
Sleep in the sun
A brilliant composition that in itself is a brilliant novel that delves into the romantic with touches of humor, the fantastic with an existential touch, the human passed through the sieve of an imagination capable of addressing emotions as clearly transformative foundations of that subjectivity that is life.
A watchmaker in love, but engrossed in his routines, a metaphor for time that leads us all, inexorably, to the task of recomposing our time. Life as a sum of dreams that haunt you, that invite you to love, but that also lead to the strangest nooks and crannies of existence.
A fine humor that confronts us with madness and extreme lucidity and that, in an environment of calm narrative calm, is seen as a prolegomena to an unexpected, disconcerting and literary ecstatic ending.
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