The surname Reverte and the most recent Spanish literature offer an idyll in black on white, a happy meeting of three great writers who lived together until the recent disappearance of Javier but contemporaries finally of our days.
Authors dedicated to a narrative that also converged, on many occasions, in the approach to the recent history of our country with a greater or lesser point of fiction or authentic historical chronicle.
Although, there are more thematic coincidences, afterwards each one traced their path. On another occasion I already talked about the work of the world bestseller Arturo Perez Reverte. And later I hope to do it, on some auspicious occasion, with Jorge M. Reverte. But today it's time to get closer to Javier Reverte, writer but above all, for the common Spaniard, tireless traveler who brought us through his works to fascinating places to travel, not to do tourism ...
Of course, you learn from traveling. And in the meantime between flights and trains, the good traveler takes his notes in the most exciting blog, which is the one that is filled in as the world looks.
Javier Reverte wrote and fed the restless spirit of the writer that is never completely satisfied and that ends up outlining novels and characters with which to fascinate not a few readers. Or he would recompose the evolution of any journey undertaken, with the details of the privileged observer who is a writer convinced of his mission every time he returns to pack his suitcase.
Top 3 recommended books by Javier Reverte
All the dreams in the world
Under this ambitious title we peek into the life of a character who points to the opposite, to all the broken dreams in the world.
Because Jaime is one of the inhabitants of this modern world, cosmopolitan and delusional in his delusions of fierce individualism. Pulling forward is sometimes an exercise of faith, of vague hope in some kind of magic that changes things.
And we cling to that to see in Jaime Arbal a hero who guides us towards a remote option of transforming our small world. Madrid little by little is adjusting to Jaime's small cosmos.
And yet, Jaime finds a fine thread of vitalism in the anecdotal encounter with a forgotten suitcase, as a metaphor for an inner journey towards happiness or at least towards the glimpses of his deception.
Jaime's transformation is taking place thanks to the new motives that this suitcase awakens and what it contains. And among a mosaic of new characters that finish structuring the narrative body, we enjoy the necessary inner journey without leaving Madrid.
Flags in the mist
Like the correspondent that he was, Javier Reverte sometimes becomes a wonderful chronicler even of some peculiar events in the middle of the Civil War.
Flags in the Mist is a story about the Spanish Civil War treated from the biography of real characters, brushstrokes under the exquisite narrative voice of the author. At this point it is not a question of considering which author writes the best novel or literary work on this dismal time.
There we have Lorenzo Silva o Javier Fences, with his novels about the war released not so long ago ... The important thing is the sum, the collection of creation, ingenuity and imagination so that what happened in the war transcends fundamentally, in the human, beyond war parts or dates of battles.
Writers are always in debt to something in order to continue writing. They are obliged to narrate the present, the past and the future. But always from the perspective of some characters that we, the readers, are going to be, so that we can live it all and end up empathizing with our world, either through real or invented characters.
In this case, Flags in the mist tells us about the ideals, the starting points that motivate the two characters representing both factions.
El torero Jose Garcia Carranza, actively involved with the national insurgents and died on December 30, 1936 and the communist brigadista John cornford, died December 28, 1936. Two days apart separate the deaths of these two characters.
Parallel destinations, very different in their journey, but almost traced in their completion. An interesting proposal in which Javier Reverte gives voice to these two active participants in the war. And in which a doubt transcends: what is there of real will in the fact that two young men go to war in search of death?
Ulysses Heart
Traveling to one of those old, not-so-distant places where our Western civilization was forged always brings an aroma to your own origins as a civilized person. Stepping on Olympia, Alexandria, Athens, Rome or some small Greek island makes you dream of that time between reality and mythology.
A time when the Mediterranean was an essay between scientific and fantasy towards the end of the known world. Limited in their knowledge and yet enormous, immeasurable in their imagination, in their beliefs, in their search for wisdom. Javier Reverte deals with all these sensations centered on the Greece that he stepped on in the trip that led to this book.
But under the influence of someone who always wants to see more and ends up being carried away by small details, the tour of these pages becomes a magical conspiracy of senses and imagination, supported by the certainties of all that remained of those days, so that each step given or each place seen means much more than an insignificant photograph. Traveling is collecting experiences more than photographs.
And this book guides you towards making the most of a trip so relevant and so fortunately close to us.
3 comments on “The 3 best books by Javier Reverte”