If there is an author in whom lyric and prose acquire a powerful sense of work, that is Mario Benedetti. It is true that his poetry ended up acquiring a greater universal character. But his interest in politics, the social and the natural repercussion on the particular experiences of the townspeople, also led him towards the essay, the theater, the novel and the short story.
From his first performance as a journalist, this author was gathering his own impression of the world in its different areas to end up composing a nourished creative food in the literary, a kind of chronicles and intrahistories that mark the advance of a tangible time through the necessary story of a writer committed to the task of humanizing history.
With his life made in his native Uruguay, and already in his mature age, he began to vary his residence passing through Argentina, Peru, Cuba or Spain. Benedetti was established for long periods in different Spanish-speaking countries. Movements marked by political circumstances, by professional evolution or by concerns typical of a writer in need of new perspectives and trends.
Benedetti garnered awards and recognitions throughout the world. Undoubtedly, he is one of the last great poets who also knew how to transfer to his novels and stories great impressions of that transcendent humanity, which is born from the small scenes of love and hate, of idealisms for survival and of declarations of independence of the soul. An intellectual and emotional handle for readers in search of intense emotions from the successful imagination of an author capable of balancing the powerful image and sensation of the poem with the adjectival description of a prose that also aims to move and narrate from the interiorities of its characters to the world.
And since not everything is poetry in this author, I am going to cheer up with his three best prose books.
Top 3 best books by Mario Benedetti
The best of sins
Posthumous compilations are always at the discretion of the publishers. This time it is a successful compendium of the author's vision of one of the human foundations, love and sex.
In the case of such a heterogeneous author, nothing better than a volume where all those brushstrokes of the diverse creator can be savored.
Review: Eternity, life beyond death is guessed when rubbing against another skin. It is at that molecular moment that we approach eternity.
Sex is nothing more than an explosive reflection of an eternal life that does not belong to us, an attempt to project ourselves beyond our last tomorrow. Possibly it is the only pleasure without contraindications, except for the moral obstacles that we have historically endeavored to establish.
That is why a carnal encounter is enjoyed so much at all times. Passion is the only truth, the only reality that communicates senses, experience and pure empiricism through pleasure. A communion that awakens from your essence, without excuses or reproaches.
Letting yourself be driven by passion is the greatest act of honesty you can ever do. Mario Benedetti knows a lot about all this. In his book The best of sins presents us with ten carnal stories, about how the characters live or have lived their best moments of life, those in which they gave themselves up to passion.
From sex as an act of full unconscious love, to love with sex or improvised sex, to unbridled passion or even to the simple evocation of moments of passion as the best memory among so many years lived.
Passion and sex without specific ages. Eternal seconds in the story of the ten characters that inhabit this book full of eternity.
A true jewel that you should read to remember the passion that lives in you, before it is too late, before carnal love becomes routine towards an eternity assumed as impossible. The book is completed with some illustrations by Sonia Pulido consistent with the existential depth of the stories. Nothing deeper than the passion of the fusion between two bodies.
Spring with a broken corner
One of those novels that impregnate the lyricism most typical of prose, the one that leads to the regret of existence, to the tragedy of the circumstances experienced.
In the case of Benedetti, his native Uruguay becomes the scene of a narrative that raises the human as the only common thread of history. Under the particular circumstances of a Uruguay subjected to one of those late twentieth century dictatorships that began in the seventies and ended in the eighties.
A coup always supposes a will to impose and for civic uniformity up to the moral point of view. And under that sinister umbrella the lives of some Uruguayans pass who hope to rebuild the spring of their lives, broken by new political designs but capable of resuming new lights of inclusion for all kinds of souls.
Time mailbox
Time, that great abstract that structures memory and that transforms what we have experienced as we gain historical perspective.
In the hands of a writer like Benedetti, the transmission belt of powerful feelings of nostalgia and lyrical yearnings, the stories included here are a kind of perspiration of the soul.
The most interesting thing about this volume is the feeling that it is all-encompassing regarding this consideration of limited time, of mortality, of memories necessarily processed by similar systems of human integration.
Spotting all expired time is always an exercise in pain or longing, overcoming or joy. The past leaves no one indifferent because what happened makes up who we are.
The best thing about Benedetti is his ability to sift everything with the brightness of humor, between echoes, smells and images that are no longer there, except in that inaccessible place where life is relived like a dream that will revisit us when we wake up at its call. .
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