La work of Antonio Orejudo It is, in many moments, one of those generational groups that ends up being transformed into a necessary critical revisionism of the last part of the XNUMXth century. A literature with a hint of stark sincerity through the author's own incursions into his raised fictions (which Enrique Vila-Matas), in that fascinating game between reality and fiction that he describes in the case of Antonio Orejudo, in the most committed way, what it means to surrender to the profession of writer.
An always suggestive mix that does not end with those frequent incursions of the author into his own set design. Orejudo also addresses historical fictions located at different times.
Although in the end the intention goes beyond the stage to find that controversial argument on which to explore novel, transgressive, comic, surreal plot lines...
A show of creativity under an overwhelming domain of language in any of its aspects, from the merely descriptive to the transcendence of the dialogues or the irruption of an action that ends up posing the most unexpected turns in a changing environment to the rhythm of a baton. fascinating narrative tempo.
Top 3 recommended books by Antonio Orejudo
The five and me
The protagonist of this novel, Tony, was a voracious reader of those series of books of "The five". Between innocence and the revolution that reading was (and still is) in those early childhood years, reading any book always becomes a mark, a bookmark mark made in our own lives.
When you recover a book of the five it seems as if the bookmark of your life is still there, in the touch of its covers full of action and adventure.
As the author himself indicates, a youthful reading is rediscovered under a very different prism at maturity, revealing undetected nuances at the time, aspects not always fortunate. But the important thing is that link with another time, which in turn links with another prism of life.
In an already grown character, who revisits those moments of adolescence with the exactness of an author who has passed through the splendor of the "The Five" books, one guesses that autobiographical point, a personal desire to recover so many sensations.
First of all, Toni would like to regain inspiration. And with it the motivation to write his outstanding novels and to teach his students, convinced at all times of what he transmits.
The problem for Toni is that all those readings of The Five accompanied times of Spanish transition that promised to offer him and his fellow generations opportunities that either did not arrive or did so late, when almost everything was lost.
It is not about nostalgia or melancholy, it is about that, perhaps what all that generation of readers of The Five wanted to become was really not to be older. Hence, Toni returns to look for his place in fiction, despite the fact that his reality may be made a few foxes.
Advantages of traveling by train
The most surreal of Orejudo's stories and, however, the one that most strips its characters towards a philosophical and psychological drift from that transgression that splashes, is uncomfortable and that finally confronts the miseries of the human condition.
Everything from a simple train seat shared with the most appropriate (or inappropriate) character, for the circumstances of a captivating protagonist like Helga Pato who attends, between stupefied and fascinated, the story of a psychiatrist who offers to expose her documentation on the madness from the prism of many of his patients and their use of language to tell stories.
As that one would say, paper holds everything. And each of the psychopathies of Ángel Sanagustín's patients serve a narrative cause that is as lucid as it is terrifying about how closely reason is with the obsession and even with the paranoia that end up materializing in so many mental illnesses made into shredded literature of the world narrated by those crazy patients of Sanagustín.
A reading as disturbing as it is aptly narrated with a mastery of the delusional exhibitions that makes the plot run with a suggestive, inalienable hook once the reading has begun.
Fabulous storytelling by story
Sometimes it seems, as if what this author tells were a parallel chronicle, an intention to rethink what is historically or academically accepted regarding a thousand and one aspects of our cultural sustenance. And this time he turns to literature.
Maybe this interpretation is my thing, but I really like that idea of rewriting everything or proposing alternatives about how things could really be.
This novel about three friends in a traditional Madrid at the beginning of the 27th century that history tells us was the cradle of the generation of XNUMX and that this novel guts us in a much more intense way. Santos, Patricio and Martiniano, between bohemians, literary and gulfs, are three boys with very different concerns who are concerned with surviving and fantasizing about literary glories of greater or lesser substance. His bizarre, grotesque and quixotic evolution points to the foundations of what later History treated as it pleased.
