For an eternal apprentice writer like me, poetry is something that has always revealed an impossible task to me. Lyrical and prose (I insist, in my opinion) is something as distant as astrophysics and gastronomy.
So when I discover that an author like Álvaro Pombo He handles himself with equal ease between poetry and prose. I think of something more innate, in the gift above learning. The ability to handle language in these two artistic manifestations is something typical of virtuosos cradled, from a very young age, by impatient muses.
While Álvaro Pombo's narrative work is built in almost all cases around the fiction, this is not an obstacle for you not to make your concerns clear. His own personal conditions, such as his manifest homosexuality, give him that weight and that characteristic of a man who has had to overcome a thousand obstacles and that he finds refuge in the letters. Adversity is a great sustenance for the writer. And Don Álvaro Pombo was always back from all of them.
Top 3 recommended novels by Álvaro Pombo
The fortune of Matilda Turpín
On many occasions the best works of established writers appear at the beginning or in the central stage of their careers.
It is not the case of this author that if he already wrote like angels for years, he continues to apply himself and surpass himself in recent years. The most existential doubt that can exist is the one that can arise when you have let inertia rule years of your life.
Relationships can be that time left to advance that has not just gone anywhere. Until one day you see a sunset on a cliff, and the world seems to ask you what are you doing? Summary: An elegant house on a cliff in northern Spain, in a figurative place, Lobreña, is the initial and final landscape of this story.
This is the story of Matilda Turpin: a wealthy woman who, after thirteen years of happy marriage to a professor of Philosophy and three children, embarks on a spectacular career rise in the world of high finance.
This brave option, in this century of women, will come at a cost. Two different professional and life projects, and a common marriage project. Was it all a big mistake? When in life is it discovered that we have been wrong? At the end or at the beginning?
The Hero of Mansard's Mansards
Under this noisy name hides a great novel of extreme social situations and fascinating personal relationships. In the apparent order a fascinating chaos can reside ...
Summary: Set in the Spanish postwar period, this is the story of Kus-Kús, a child of the upper bourgeoisie of the north, a kind of gnome who inserts himself dangerously into the world of adults; of his extravagant aunt Eugenia; of Julian, a servant with a past and an equivocal glamor; of Miss Adelaida Hart, admirable English governess; of the grandmother Mercedes and her companion and friend María del Carmen Villacantero; Manolo, the waiter at the La Cubana grocery store, an accredited stallion and a regular visitor to Aunt Eugenia. It is a story founded on the limits of the language of each of its unforgettable characters, which is like founding the relationship on the edge of universes as fascinating as they are diverse.
The trembling of the hero
"Hero is anyone who does what he can", a phrase that I have always liked. And that's what this novel is about. Roman longs for his hero times, those in which he taught and tried to make men and women of profit.
Old age is a strange stage, without perspectives and full of memories, but there is still time for surprises and uncertainties.
Summary: Román is a retired university professor who is invaded by nostalgia for the bright days of pedagogy in which he fascinated his students, awakening their love of knowledge and helping them achieve a higher and nobler life. Among his former students are Elena and Eugenio, a couple of doctors whom he still treats and with whom he has established complex intellectual and sentimental relationships.
On the other hand, flattered by the interest in his person shown by a young journalist, Héctor, allows him to enter his life without suspecting that the tortured past of the new character will trap him in a situation in which he is incapable of making decisions, of commit to the drama you are attending.
With a tense, vibrant writing that dazzles both for its plastic findings and for its philosophical inquiry, The trembling of the hero it is at the same time an act of faith in literature as a territory where to raise the big issues: trust and betrayal, the possibility of repentance, guilt, cowardice, courage, the meaning of existence.
