3 best books by Rafael Chirbes

The Valencian writer Rafael Chirbes He was one of the most successful authors on the Spanish literary scene. And it is so in large part because of his literary practice of intense realism. His fiction writing, his articles or his essays always compose a faithful reflection of what happened. His prose always starts from the attachment and the crystalline conviction of making an imperishable chronicle of what has been lived. A debt assumed from the very Perez Galdos which of course served as an inspiration to Chirbes on occasion.

But when Chirbes writes a novel of course he fictionalizes like no one else. Because realism is not at odds with the noble art of telling stories of one kind or another. The necessary complement for the novels of this author to transcend towards that humanistic aspect of the great works simply occurs as we multiply the focuses of his characters.

In the action and in the dialogues, in the descriptions from the outside in, to the psyche of the protagonist of any scene, we end up being carried away by an impressionist side of the pen moved like the brush, capable of transmitting from its characters a powerful mixture of disparate colors. It is about channeling essential passions, emotions and subjective layers that shape reality in its most complex and fascinating form for the reader's reason.

Top 3 recommended novels by Rafael Chirbes

On the shore

When a death appears on the scene as soon as a current novel begins, we immediately rush into a hectic search, unfathomable mysteries at the bottom of a criminal mind or a Machiavellian plan with an ominous end.

Here death is something else. In fact, the opposite effect may happen. Death can lose interest. It is just a corpse consumed by millions of bacteria from the Olba swamp. And the swamp may be the consciousness charged with the passage of time, where we abandon our own corpses a little each day. The protagonist of the story, Manuel becomes any reader because his soul gathers everything, the best and the worst. And any transition is always manageable, understandable.

Because every turn, every change of course, however erratic it may be, ends up finding undeniable reasons that we are winning between the harshness, the miseries, the loves and the disappointments. Chirbes's prose acquires that lyrical tone, inconceivable in the novel, only possible in geniuses of the forms that end up rising to the sky or sinking to the bottom of the darkest well. And it is in these contrasts that the human shines like a pearl in the middle of a story that begins with a death in the dark life of the mangrove swamp of our society.

On the shore

Crematorium

The aforementioned duality of Chirbes's works also have another added virtue, very enjoyable in this novel. It is about contextualized reading or simple reading as a story of the experiences of its characters.

The symphony always sounds good thanks to the virtuosity of an author who knows how to get the best out of each language instrument towards the best harmonization of the idea or final intention to be transmitted. But everything is always in the hands of the musicians ... The characters of Chirbes have that captivating life of the inhabitants of the most real life and close to our skin. And that seems like an exogenous addition to the creation of the novel. Because the great stories are those in which their protagonists act with the intensity of someone who knows they are alive, who believes that a destiny beyond what the writer on duty can certainly carve out.

Crematorio is as good a novel as "On the Shore" but with a more marked social component that perhaps at some point took me away from some characters with whom I loved to advance through the story. But the interest of a writer in undressing social miseries always ends up slipping into every plot to a lesser or greater extent. And there it is only about tastes ... The point is that since the death of Matías, his brother Rubén centralizes the plot together with his family and a series of ramifications that serve to weave that ivy of life and rich, fresh, bright social chronicle , thick and dark in its depths

Crematorium

The good handwriting

The intrahistory par excellence. The focus is completely oriented to the small, among the shadows of a social evolution that only accompanies as a silent cosmos around the Earth rotating around the sun.

On that planet are only Ana and her son, the memories of a mother and all the explanations, justifications, old wishes, failures, guilt ... The life of the mother vomited from the soul to address the gray days of the postwar period, at the end of any postwar period in which the moral order is once again fixed as an incipient religion established for posterity, for the whole of life in a social marriage with daily violence, contempt, mistreatment and omission of any other voice.

The narrative beauty of Chirbes, his melancholic line, contributes that always essential side of human becoming in a manifestly involutional evolution always. And it seems as if the only way to share "humanity" in its most meaningful definition and connotation is to soak up the wise words that Ana finds to expose to her son the shadows and the few flashes of light that the world share.

The good handwriting
5/5 - (12 votes)

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