Columnist, writer, chronicler, narrator, biographer, poet, musical lyricist and essayist. Everything you undertake Benjamín Prado gives off a kind of epic tinge from the everyday. His mastery of language and its symbolic resources towards showing off the anecdotal and the simple, simply transforms and elevates the most elementary description or that detail that escapes the average observer.
Of course, this is where the quality of a good storyteller resides ... In a lecture by a writer, I heard him say that writers are rare types, unable to remember where they left the keys but very capable of delving into detail, where motivation ends up being reflected last of any scene in that great novel that is life.
Benjamín Prado He is one of that privileged group of writers who know how to always find new focuses of attention to sublimate a reality that would otherwise make waters in the seas of routine.
In a perfect communion between the most popular language and the most opportune of metaphors, Benjamín embellishes the form and streamlines the substance. Probably, this ability leads him to his particular literary career, which now addresses fiction and also looks at the biographical story (I remember, for example, the case of «Even the truth«, Written in tandem with Joaquín Sabina himself).
Without a doubt, a virtuoso of our days that everyone can and should read to savor literature with the royal garnish of street life.
Top 3 recommended books of Benjamín Prado
Reckoning
It never hurts to remember what we got ourselves into with the last economic crisis, even though the repetition of errors is something innate to a short-term policy like the one we have before us.
The point is that in this novel, in which Juan Urbano (the author's alter ego) takes on the task of writing the life and work of Martín Duque, in an exercise between the atonement of sins and egocentrism.
Well, the truth is that Mr. Duque represents the greed that leads us to each of the crises that liberalism feeds. Juan Urbano investigates the character, trying to adjust the truth to a literature at least condescending with his life and work ...
Through the inquiries of Professor Juan Urbano, we are presented with profound, unavoidable reflections once the force of the author's simple and captivating language always ends up splashing the reader.
This novel is an inexhaustible source of criticism of our times, with magnetic puns, with phrases that extol the detail of the greatest contradictions that sustain so many aspects of our society.
The thirty surnames
Again Juan Urbano is a singular character from Benjamín Prado, an alter ego who served as a journalist in local columns of the newspaper El País and who later resumed a new, fuller life in the author's fictional narrative.
The point is that Juan Urbano, a part-time professor of literature, returns in Los thirty Surnames. the literary.
The previous adventures of Juan Urbano were: Bad people who walk, Operation Gladio and Adjustment of accounts, three stories that present a Juan faced in social and political particularities of our days in Spain.
On this occasion, thanks to his already recognized prestige as a researcher, he is hired to investigate a bastard family branch of a powerful family. The initial rejection of illegitimate children can arouse the curiosity of legitimate descendants long afterward.
What would become of that extramarital daughter of the great-grandfather? A part of the family, the most human and curious, tries to locate the lost branch of the genealogical tree.
While the other party, more practical and little given to eccentric reunions that can only lead to patrimonial struggles, is radically opposed. The problem is that in the end the search is not only aimed at a possible reunion between the curious and the human.
In the story that connects with that great-grandfather and his sexual slip, we delve into the roots of traditional families, raised from shady businesses of a past in which colonialism justified everything, even the greatest injustices...
Bad people who walk
In this novel the author touches on one of the most sinister and inhuman episodes in our recent history. And see that war and dictatorship are alienating enough for our collective memory.
But there are always details that show the worst among the worst. Through the character of a teacher who investigates a writer, we peek into the cruel world of child theft that happened in our country during war and dictatorship and that reached the figure of 30.000 cases!
Those robberies can only be understood in a vile society, under a framework in which dark characters, also of immaculate public presence, would establish sinister channels with which they emptied bellies and life plans...
Benjamín Prado he is being, as a writer, a welcome discovery. I am reading The thirty surnames and in addition to learning a lot about recent history and not so much, his story is funny and deep in equal parts. Congratulations to the author.
He is undoubtedly one of those authors to discover. Especially in his story as a hybrid narrator, from here and there, between chronicles and fictions ...