Rosa Montero, brand new National Prize for Literature 2017 is a writer and journalist who has summarized these two activities in a kind of symbiosis from whose porosity he has known how to load his novels with a social chronicle and his various articles with literature, collaborations and many other writing assignments in a multitude of magazines and newspapers for which he has left his particular stamp as a chronicler of the times in which he has been living.
I will confess that every Sunday I read his column, along with that of Pérez Reverte. What I will no longer confess is that I also usually read some other, like that of an infamous guy with a stuffed face with which I get those doses of humor from the daily tragedies and epics of the aforementioned.
But let's focus on Rosa, the absolute protagonist of this post, which raises my choice of her most recommended literary works.
3 recommended novels by Rosa Montero
The cannibal's daughter
Sometimes, or rather almost always, any type of search ends up resulting in a final encounter of other things, of new things that perhaps we were not looking for.
It's about forcing yourself out of your comfort zone to find what's lost. And in that exit to new spaces we end up recognizing ourselves as different people, or more complete, or more vital. Maybe we will find something new that we don't like or maybe the opposite will happen ...
The important thing is that only by searching, searching can we really find ourselves as we are in our most complete essence. Summary: Lucía has been with Ramón for more than ten years in a relationship overcome by monotony when, unexpectedly, he disappears without any explanation.
After reporting the case to the police, he undertakes a search that will lead him to get to know each other much better and in which two unusual companions will help him: Adrián, an attractive disturbing boy, and Fortuna, an old anarchist full of memories.
The cannibal's daughter is one of Rosa Montero's best-known novels, especially after the film adaptation that was made in 2003 by Mexican director Antonio Serrano and with Cecilia Roth and Kuno Becker as protagonists.
Tears in the rain
I have to admit that when I discovered that Rosa Montero had written a science fiction narrative, I was surprised. I was even upset by this title taken from Blade Runner.
But it was only the first impact, after I was effusively happy for this incursion of a narrator of her prestige into this genre of my loves. The result is an interesting dystopian proposal, a call to reflect on the future, on our values, on the legacy of our civilization.
Summary: United States of Earth, Madrid, 2109, increases the number of replicant deaths that suddenly go mad. Detective Bruna Husky is hired to discover what is behind this wave of collective madness in an increasingly unstable social environment. Meanwhile, an anonymous hand transforms the central archive of documentation of the Earth to modify the history of humanity.
Aggressive, lonely, and misfit, detective Bruna Husky finds herself immersed in a world-wide plot as she faces constant suspicion of treachery from those who claim to be her allies with the sole company of a series of marginal beings capable of preserving reason and reason. tenderness in the midst of the vertigo of the persecution.
A survival novel, about political morality and individual ethics; about love, and the need of the other, about memory and identity. Rosa Montero narrates a search in an imaginary, coherent and powerful future, and she does so with passion, dizzying action and humor, an essential tool for understanding the world.
I will treat you like a queen
One of her first novels and probably the novel with which she already uncovered herself as a narrator. A story of characters, of their great depth, of the social background of the big city, with its lights and shadows ...
Summary: The dreams and realities of a cast of memorable characters parade through Desiré, led by Bella, a bolero singer; Poco, an enigmatic old man of uncertain origin; the spinster and candid Antonia and her brother Damien.
Their lives are an impressive demonstration of the distance, sometimes insurmountable, that mediates between the desire for happiness and the real possibilities of achieving it. Like the obverse and reverse of a bolero, this overwhelming novel plays with a contrast: on the degraded urban space of a Madrid nightclub, Desiré, the defaced postcard of an improbable and sumptuous Tropicana, the legendary Cuban club in its better times, become a myth and refuge for a handful of dreamers.
I will treat you like a queen, Rosa Montero's third novel, can be seen as a black farce and as a pink tragedy. The force and intensity with which it is narrated, the forcefulness of the characters that can be touched, allow us to see, with acid truth, a chipped world that reveals the solitude of all, under the false colors of a painting that is cracking.
Other recommended books by Rosa Montero
The unknown woman
Rosa Montero's versatility goes beyond the plot and even reaches the creative process. Because this four-handed novel, together with Olivier Truc, becomes a perfect plot with a detective aftertaste (the one that gave Barcelona so much glory thanks, above all, to Montalbán) with action on both sides of the Pyrenees and a very current plot.
It is night and in the port of Barcelona a guard is making his rounds when his German shepherd stops dead to sniff a container desperately. Upon arrival, the mossos d'esquadra found a woman in a fetal position, unconscious and dehydrated. She has a gash on her temple, burns on her face and body, and she doesn't remember who she is or what her native language is, but she's alive.
While she is recovering at the Hospital Clínic, a man tries to kill her. Inspector Anna Ripoll, an expert in trafficking in women, seems to have found her identity and her address: Alicia Garone; 19, rue du Chariot, Lyon. In the French city, inspector Erik Zapori is looking for a way to get rid of the investigation to which internal affairs is submitting him for crimes of corruption and pimping. Nothing better than traveling to Spain to help resolve a case, although this may be the most complex in his life.
