For those who understand that we certainly paint something in this world, life is usually to burn stages. AND Gutierrez Aragon it complies with the inscrutable dictates that guide the transition in the cycles such as the change of partner in the dances. Something like that Woody Allen which we are also finding more in book covers or in concerts than behind the scenes.
Here we bring Gutiérrez Aragón as the writer he is today, a narrator who treasures his half-dozen novels that, despite everything, do not renounce his natural cinematic inspirations, that other world to which Manuel belonged in another previous life. At times he overwhelms us with a scenery where it seems that anything can happen; At other moments it seems as if we were inhabiting one of those moments that point to immortality in a single gesture.
The point is that in the creative universe of Gutiérrez Aragón the plots are full of naked realism, without artifice, of close and even domestic settings. But this is perhaps so that we feel the vertigo even stronger when we end up projected towards the dreamlike. Because we also arrive at those multidimensional spaces that fit perfectly in the small, in the interstices of life, like glue that holds the daily lives of its characters.
Who has not inhabited dreams when waking up? Even more so when dreams have clung to our consciousness beyond the ring of the alarm clock, as if wanting to assault our always subjective world. That is a bit of what emerges from Gutiérrez Aragón's novels, a warmth of estrangement, a tuning into unexpected frequencies to listen to and decipher wavelengths as certain as they are unsuspected.
Top 3 recommended novels by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón
Life before march
When someone abandons what they have dedicated themselves to with passion and notable success, it is because they are preparing to undertake something that calls them with unusual intensity. This first novel by Gutiérrez Aragón has a point of creative big bang, of explosion and restart of everything. Of course, reality has cinematographic aspects, even in its worst scenes. This novel collects episodes that should never have happened and achieves a strange catharsis between reality and fiction. As if fiction could devour the worst realities, converting them into something very different...
Two strangers meet on a train that comes from all stations and goes to several places at the same time, a train that is neither born nor dies, a circular inaugurated after years of community bureaucracy. It has no header or terminal station. It is the year 2024, and two thousand wagons form the metallic serpent of this enormous thing. The journey between Baghdad and Lisbon is long.
The main train never stops to pick up or unload users, but rather a satellite, which is placed next to it, on an adjacent track, increases speed until it reaches it. Passengers transfer to the huge convoy and vice versa. And from one country to another, Martín, the one with the deep voice, and Ángel, the one with the dark face, those two strangers who at first averted their gazes, become interlocutors, and taste the wine of each region they pass through.
A few glasses of a fleshy Romanian wine, then the wines of the Danubian region, followed by a light white from Friuli and some other from the Rhone. And the spirits and the strangeness of a speed that baffles clocks unleash languages, and stories are linked in this journey to an unexpected destination, in this oriental and harshly contemporary tale that crosses the Europe of the near future, of the near past. .
Both are from Spain. Martín had an affair with a Maghreb in the northern mountains. Life and History separated them, but the girl's eyes, deep and black, still claim him from somewhere. Angel, the other traveler, found himself mixed with an extremist group. Twenty years have passed, but it seems as if his buddy, the Tunisian, is still on the prowl and threatens to demand payment of old favors.
The fear, the painful memory and also the illusion travel on board. Because these strangers on a train do not agree on perfect crimes - perhaps because imperfect crimes have already happened - and the journey is the story, and the story is the journey. Although, in the finite infinity of the train, the parallels of their lives end up crossing, and the evocation of a fattening champion pig, the erotic revelations of a sexual athlete father, or a surreal soccer match between Islamic extremists, reveal to us how It was life before March, of that march.
The eye of heaven
Or the director's eye, if the characters in a movie could look up to find who places them at such or such a point so that they release their phrase. That phrase that can give them their minutes of glory. Life is a film shot so that everyone, among so many observers, stays
At the heart of this novel are four women (Margarita, the pretty young mother; Valen, her eldest daughter; Bel, the rambunctious middle daughter, and little Clara) whose lives seem to be complicated both by financial reasons and by the outbreak of crime. sensuality. In a photograph of the four you can see the shadow of the person who took it, a father who earned his nomadic living selling exquisite ice creams, and of whom nothing has been heard since he fled after a dramatic debt persecution, the The same ones that force the four women to leave their home and go to live in a cabin in the mountains.
With his so characteristic style, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón draws a familiar universe on horseback of the realistic and the magical, presided over by the radar sphere that, from the top of the mountain, contemplates the movements of the four women like a powerful eye, the that gives title to this novel. The one made to the Alan Parsons song ("I am the eye in the sky, looking at you ...") is the first of the references in a book that contains many of them, some to works by the author himself (he appears as occasional narrator Ludi Pelayo, whom we already met in When the cold reaches the heart and that here he acts as Valen's lover) and others in the form of stories typical of All the one thousand and One Nights, by which the millionaire Forbes, Liz Taylor, the French president Chirac or the prince of Morocco parade.
And along with these multiple references, also a set of shots, voices, registers and suggestions, which are wisely mixed in a short and agile novel whose action advances driven by the mastery of language and by an intelligent and cultured humor.
Undercarriage
You can never completely escape its shadow. Because it is always waiting for us. The filmmaker Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón reveals himself in this story with his shadow well glued to his feet again. The cinema becomes metaliterature, the past restructured in the novel so that the matter takes on new life without the script filters and the characters who execute them. Let's revisit those days brought to today in the filming of life itself.
A young filmmaker is preparing to shoot his first film in Madrid where Berlanga shoots The executioner and Grimau has been sentenced to death. Suspicion and threat reign in the city. A young filmmaker is preparing to shoot his first film in Madrid where Berlanga shoots The executioner, while in the real world Grimau has been sentenced to death.
In the short space of six days and nights, events are linked: the love and heartbreak of the protagonist Pelayo Pelayo with his girlfriend Laura, the discussions with the famous producer Midas Merlin, the meetings with the journalist who tells him the news for saving the life of the condemned man, the visits to the set on which Berlanga is filming, the walks with the scandalous actor Juan Luis Mañara, the descent into hell in a movie theater with continuous sessions, humor and anxiety ...
The story takes place in a rogue metropolis heiress of Bohemia and that is already beginning to be a developmentalist. All this while the young filmmaker obsessively tries to finish his script for the imminent start of shooting the film. Gutiérrez Aragón's novel describes an absolutely real world that nevertheless seems to have come out of a mystery film. Undercarriage it is a subtle, chaotic-looking plot that unfolds with geometric precision, returning us to a substantial, decidedly free, and magnificent narrator.
