Some nascent writers in adulthood would never have intuited that they were going to be one long ago, when they had not yet written anything. a preterite louis landero More creatively moved towards musical paths, he envisioned a future far removed from literature. But just as happened with Saint Paul, it is always a good time to start believing, to reconvert. Maybe it was a matter of fate... the point is that one day Luis Landero began to love books like he who discovers a lustful lover. And inside there he was left enjoying so many pages that he had not read until then.
And yet, there is no doubt that the famous writer's wood is not something that can be worked. Either you are made from within that noble raw material or any composition turns into a bland conglomerate of splinters turned to dust. Writer's wood teaches how to look at the world differently, to observe the details and grant them their true magnitude and meaning.
In the experiences prior to his first scribbling on a sheet of paper, Luis Landero began to carve a wood grown naturally for years, precisely his young years in which ingenuity ensured survival.
And from the ingenious experiences that Luis Landero had to live, the budding writer was outlining other types of experiences projected on a paper that had not yet been deflowered. There the wood was waiting for its moment to relate in new private books the lives of types immersed in routine, of broken dreams and farces, of tragedies such as comedies and comedies with the tragic stench of deception.
3 recommended books by Luis Landero
Emerson's orchard
Once the sky of the writer's office has been reached (in that most unsuspected and therefore authentic way), each new Landero novel is a prayer for his legion of faithful readers. Basically (although that's already saying a lot), because it connects with that pending life, that story never lived and that soul never occupied by all of us who give ourselves to reading in search of mirrors where we can recognize ourselves. We approached Emerson's orchard on one of those leisurely evening walks. Waiting for the extraordinary to surprise us at any moment...
Landero picks up the memory and readings of his particular personal universe where he left them in The balcony in winter. And he does so in this memorable book, which masterfully re-braids the memories of the child in his town of Extremadura, the teenager who has just arrived in Madrid or the young man who begins to work, with stories and scenes lived in the books with the same passion and greed than in the real world.
En Emerson's orchard characters from a still recent time appear, but who seem to belong to a distant then, and as full of life as Pache and his bowling alley in the middle of nowhere, hyperactive women who support families like the narrator's grandmother and aunt, quiet men who suddenly reveal amazing secrets, or candid boyfriends like Florentino and Cipriana and their enigmatic courtship at nightfall.
Landero turns all of them into pairs of the protagonists of the Ulises, congeners of the characters in Kafka's novels or Stendhal, and in companions of the most brilliant reflections on writing and creation in a unique mixture of humor and poetry, of evocation and charm. It's hard not to feel transported to a story told by the fire.
a ridiculous story
The story of every capitalized love story, whether current or remote, may not differ so much in its romantic aspect. Because a romantic novel of the transcendent, as I say nothing to do with the pink genre, tells us about feelings that are impossible to culminate due to social condition, outbreaks of war or other exceptionalities.
The question is, how do you decide? louis landero on this occasion, to bring a new look at love, at courtship, at those beginnings where everyone looks for their place in potential political families with the apparent goodness and the dead buried in the basement of each home... Marcial is a demanding man, with a gift word, and proud of his self-taught training. One day he meets a woman who not only fascinates him, but who brings together everything he would like to have in life: good taste, high position, relationships with interesting people.
He, who thinks highly of himself, is in fact a manager in a meat company. She, who has introduced herself as Pepita, is a student of art and belongs to a wealthy family. Marcial needs to tell us his love story, the deployment of his talents to conquer her, his strategy to unseat the other suitors and especially what happened when he was invited to a party at his beloved's house.
Fine rain
In Luis Landero's novels we always find the brightest brilliance of any meticulously constructed character, with the intention of reaching the depths of his being. Each new Landero book is an in-depth presentation of a protagonist who passes by our couch to expose us all that he is.
Stories from the inside out, of the insides never manifested by people in the general masquerade and that serve for that empathy of our eccentricities and follies, of our dreams and desires, after all, all of this shared as humans that we are in front of the differences in circumstances that are presented to us.
And in this novel "Fine Rain" Gabriel's circumstances lead us to the familiar, to that strange changing space and reference of our entire life, to the cell of modern society (as described by some philosopher). Gabriel, Aurora, Sonia, Andrea, Horacio orbit around the octogenarian mother who just wanted to see them together. But everyone has their reasons for disappointment, for feelings of guilt, resentment and betrayal.
Undoubtedly, despite the late start of his literary vocation, Landero gathered that accumulation of sensations and perspectives that every good writer needs to become the narrator turned chronicler, capable of synthesizing from the differences of childhood and adulthood that ends up being able to distance to those who previously made up that unbreakable unity.
Aurora is that being of light, capable of empathizing with everyone and, however, unable to find a meeting place between siblings who just wait for any discrepancy to jump to recover old quarrels. Gabriel, who always tried to take the lead, does not give up in his efforts to make a blur to recover the essence of a fraternity full of scenes of discord that will reappear with that first trickle from an increasingly black sky.
Perhaps it is just a matter of forcing a meeting that leads the mother to think that not everything was in vain, that the broken family can open up new horizons when she is not there. But each brother has something very interesting to tell us, as I say, while we listen to them like psychoanalysts, trying to compose a minimally real puzzle from a sum of subjectivities that awaken that feeling that festering can hardly heal like a clean wound. And then the reunion ends up being a new reckoning with an unforeseeable end.
Other great recommended novels by Luis Landero ...
The last function
The best is the last function. In life, as in the circus, everyone gives their best when life is about to happen between fanfare and solemnity. And the public appreciates it with a similar feeling of nostalgia. Magic happens between everyone's predisposition. What happens then is that life becomes fiction, a dream, until it becomes felt like a touch that gives you goosebumps.
A group of retired friends still remember the afternoon of that Sunday in January 1994 when a mature Tito Gil made his appearance at the town's bar and restaurant, in the Sierra de Madrid. They recognized him because of his prodigious voice. The famous actor, the child prodigy, the great theatrical promise who seemed to have triumphed on the stages of the capital, or perhaps half the world, returned to his hometown.
Perhaps in search of notoriety, Tito Gil will soon propose a great collective representation with which to revitalize tourism and attract people. It will be the last chance to avoid gradual depopulation. Nobody seems to resist, but they need a great actress to give him the answer. On those dates, Paula, a woman who has seen her dreams crushed by her work routine, takes the last train in Atocha and wakes up, without knowing it, in the station of a town unknown to her.
Under the spell of a collective oral story, in The Last Function Luis Landero once again delights us with the fascination of a story and characters who seem to come out of the mist and take the stage to feel transformed. An unexpected love story, and an endless number of humorous and admirable secondary characters that culminate in a masterful outcome.
Negotiable life
The projection of this late writer is inexhaustible. With each new novel, Luis Landero deals with introducing us to memorable characters. On this occasion we enjoy the particular vision of the world of Hugo Bayo, a loser convinced that this is not his place. A rogue waiting to devise the perfect plan for him to escape from the social mediation in which his existence is suffocated. It may really be that all of his concerns have deep roots in his past, in his barely-overcome conflicts. So imagining, projecting his life into a better future relieves him. Fantasy serves him to cajole one another and to deceive himself about impossible dreams.
The balcony in winter
If there is an evocative and unique town name, it is Albuquerque. Without ever having been there, its pronunciation invites me to think about the ancestral, the magical, in the name of a final scene, literary or cinematographic. Ramblings that one has ...
The point is that in this fictionalized biography (as any composition of memories usually is) Luis Landero tells us about the new world, between the tragic and the disturbing, that the loss of his father meant for a boy. It is about Luis Landero as a character and the truth is that writing about oneself with novelistic overtones must be an emotional winding exercise at times and open to an open grave at other times.
The point is that the story of the writer who did not know that he was going to be a writer is precisely an ode to the improvisation of survival, to the search for a future in the big city, to hope as a simple tomorrow or a small job with who can get ahead. But Landero also tells us about the budding guitarist's bohemian intention to masterfully describe the complete scenario of a Spain between repression and the surreptitious strength of freedom.
Late age games
If in Negotiable Life we ​​are presented with a Hugo Bayo committed to the master plan to escape his miseries, in Late Age Games we finally find the transformed character, the Kafkaesque evolution of worldly frustrations. Gregorio, by complete chance and firm will to escape from his sad shell, becomes Faroni, his invented character with whom he readjusts a world that is leaking water everywhere. The title of the novel refers to that adolescent self-deception that in On so many occasions, it continues to accompany the adult locked in impossible materializations.
For Gregorio it is difficult to bury old youthful dreams forever. Succumbing to them can transform him into the grotesque reflection of what he wanted to be and was not, a kind of masochistic satisfaction that does not take him out of harsh reality but leads him to ecstatic moments of fantasy with the credulous Gil. Because Gil, someone as mediocre as he is, is determined to contemplate, like Sancho Panza, the illustrious character in resplendent armor.
A modern quixotic story about Faroni that awakens laughter as well as rich meditations, and that can only end as the drama that anticipates all falsehoods taken as a way of life.
