3 best books by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón

In the presentation of a book, in those moments in which the presenter on duty praises the virtues of the author in question, it is always interesting to look at the writer, in his non-verbal language once he is exposed to the public as the attraction of turn.

I quote this because I especially remember a presentation by Ignacio Martinez de Pisón. That kind of lost gaze sometimes projected from time to time towards that imaginary of the writer about to give an account of his work and recovered for the cause of reality before the words of the presenter.

Without knowing him personally, the idea that I got from this writer was that of a calm creator, with an intense gaze, with a mischievous touch in the particular physiognomy of his eyes. A combination that finally points to those equally intense but calm stories, sustained in that phantom of creation that is the past. Times already settled by history where the characters seem condemned, while occupying that stage of any past time that if not better, at least it becomes more human even in adversity.

Thanks to that ability to string together intrahistories like great novels, Martinez de Pisón (or rather his work) made the leap to cinema both in adaptations and in writing his own scripts.

Undoubtedly a chameleonic writer, a magnetic storyteller who develops his investigations and who builds characters full of that contradiction so human that starts from the very rupture of childhood and adulthood (his first novel "The dragon tenderness" points to my opinion towards that idea of ​​the greatest of human contrasts between childhood and the supposed real world, a notion ratified in his recent novel "Natural Law"), finally composing narratives as perennial as the ideal of the soul.

Top 3 recommended books by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón

End of season

Time passes quickly, like any song that accompanies our best memories, the chorus remains with its cloying flavor of defeat and melancholy. But we would be nothing without it, without the yesterday that paves existence on our way to nowhere.

At this end of the season, the protagonists reach each new summer from the most complete coincidence that allows them to still be together, despite everything. And his song always plays too despite everything. Only their melancholy of yesterday is transformed for them into a gentle surrender to chance and the transformative turning points of existence.

A road next to the Portuguese border, June 1977. Juan and Rosa, barely teenagers, have an appointment at a clandestine abortion clinic, but an accident prevents them from reaching their destination. Almost twenty years later, Rosa and her son Iván begin what will be the project of her life, the recovery of a campsite on the Costa Dorada, at the other end of the peninsula. Since Iván was born they have lived in different places, always provisionally, always alone, fleeing from a past that will not take long to catch up with them.

Season's End is a novel about the strength, sometimes poisoned, of blood ties; about family secrets that make each generation doomed to repeat certain mistakes, and about how knowing transforms us into other people.

Ignacio Martínez de Pisón traces memorable characters and an extraordinary mother-son relationship in this story that spans almost a quarter of a century and reveals that the unresolved past is a vital trap even if we try to ignore it, or precisely because of it. 

End of season

Tomorrow

The general gray of postwar Spain spread like a blanket that prevented any process of cultural and social osmosis once the world emerged from World War II a few years later.

The most interested policy of the allies allowed Spain to continue in that dark no man's land of the Franco dictatorship. And it is those forty years until the death of the dictator that this day tomorrow points to, which never heralds a eve of liberation. The role of Justo Gil, an oppressed character in the family and in the social, happens to be an emblem of the alienation of those days.

In his city, Barcelona, ​​Justo Gil embarks on the adventure of survival, putting himself on the most opportune side to be able to do that, just survive. Only in the end we all find our justice.

The sum of the perspectives of the characters who interacted with Justo make up that Cainite mosaic of Spain plunged into the tragedy of repression, with a police trained to execute the most evil laws ...

the good reputation

Reputation. One of those words in disuse from the moral to the merely linguistic. Because reputation was something almost physical that was hung as a label on families and even lineages as an indelible mark. That is why it is so opportune to fly over the time of a family making its way through its destiny from parents to children and grandchildren. Of course, if someone is so obsessed with a good reputation, it may be because he has something serious to hide...

Samuel and Mercedes contemplate with concern the future of their two daughters in the face of the imminent decolonization of Morocco and the return of the Spanish from the Protectorate to the Peninsula. We are in Melilla, it is the fifties and, in this context of change and uncertainty, the couple decides to travel to Malaga to settle in a Spain that is slowly beginning to open up to modernity. 

Hand in hand with five members of the same family, this saga covers thirty years of our history and travels through cities such as Melilla, Tetuán, Málaga, Zaragoza or Barcelona. The desires and illusions of Samuel and Mercedes, their daughters and their grandchildren will be conditioned by unspeakable secrets in a life that passes fleetingly and unexpectedly.

La buena reputación is a novel about the inheritance we receive from the past and about the feeling of belonging, the need to find our place in the world. Essential author of Spanish letters,

the good reputation

Other recommended books by Martínez de Pisón

Natural law

Strange times those of the Spanish transition. The perfect setting to present the stranger Angel's family nucleus. The young man moves between the frustration of a father who bet everything on a dream and who is unable to escape failure.

The need for a father figure, personified in a father not very focused on his responsibility as such, makes both Ángel and his three brothers travel in that ambiguous space where love and hate fight to take over the souls of children.

Ángel studies law and experiences first-hand the conversion of Barcelona and Madrid into two cities that seek their place between modernity and longing. Between a new legal system, a new status of a Spain in a no man's land, Ángel seeks the order of things and the order of his family.

The reasons why a father can neglect his children, if there are any, and the cause for some children to continue looking for a father where there has not been, move this story of personal transition into a social transition.

A good novel of nuances, with a heavy movement at times but with an agile final reading through characters that manage to transmit so many and so many sensations amassed in that double space, that of hope in a new society emerging in a new homeland and that of the possible reconciliation with that other country, parental authority never exercised.

fire castles

The hackneyed story is never as true as when it is made up of bits and pieces of life, mosaic pieces, intra-stories narrated in as vivid and exquisite a way as Martínez de Pisón manages to unite them. The official chronicles link the events as garments without tailoring. The writer's intrastories make everything make sense to the observer who wants to understand the events of any moment. The virtue of any writer in the face of any past narrative resides in that sensation of a yesterday accessible to anyone who looks into the past to rescue truths like fists...

Madrid, 1939-1945. Many struggle to get ahead in a city marked by hunger, penury and the black market. Like Eloy, a crippled young man who tries to save his imprisoned brother from death row; Alicia, a movie theater ticket saleswoman who loses her job for following her heart; Basilio, a university professor who is facing a purification process; the Falangist Matías, who traffics in confiscated objects, or Valentín, capable of any vileness in order to purge his previous militancy. Seamstresses, students, policemen: lives of ordinary people in extraordinary times.

Castles of Fire is a novel that contains more truth than many history books and that conveys the pulse of a time in which fear almost wiped out hope that naturally made its way through devastation. A time of reconstruction in which the war has ended only for a few but in which no one is safe, neither those who rose at the feet of the dictator nor those who fought to overthrow him.

Ignacio Martínez de Pisón returns with an ambitious choral novel in which he mixes a superb and documented historical setting with the fascinating future of a handful of unforgettable characters, and which represents the culmination of a great literary career crowned by books so celebrated by critics and the public. like The good reputation, The day after tomorrow and Milk teeth.

fire castles

Filek

In his usual task of investigating the Franco regime, Martínez de Pisón recently presented us with a story between the grotesque and the surreal, a narrative about real events that show the ridiculous time lived by old Spain kidnapped by the dictator.

There are characters that appear in history as authentic rarities towards a singular protagonism. Charlatans who aim to be transcendental elements until they happen on their own merit to become temporary jokes and jokes that disappear after a short time.

And yet, as the years go by, the anecdotal may return with a very different consideration, that of extraordinary characters with a comic and absurd point that is transgressive, anachronistic, sympathetic and even much more transcendental than what the own could have expected. protagonists.

Only records of this type of characters remain in newspaper archives where researchers, onlookers or writers like Ignacio Martínez de Pisón end up recovering them for the cause of the most grotesque intrahistory. After his latest novel, Natural Law, Martínez de Pisón presents us with a very curious book.

Thanks to Albert von Filek, Franco was about to consider that his autarky could be seen at levels of world power comparable to the old Spanish Empire. This Austrian, who at heart seems more born of the Spanish picaresque, argued that he was capable of producing a synthetic fuel with running water and other plant components. And of course, the regime saw a vein in him.

The exotic nature of his name, his assumed status as a renowned scientist, and his imposed security ended up convincing Franco and his family. It was to such an extent that the news of indigenous fuel production was announced with great fanfare.

The chemist Filek had wanted to favor Spain against many other tempting offers from oil manufacturers around the world. The most interesting thing about the matter would undoubtedly be Filek's very personal perspective… how far was he going to go? How was he going to get the money from Franco and escape with his pufo exploding in the hands of the dictator?

Undoubtedly a great rogue in our history, one more grotesque who uncovered Franco's propaganda miseries in the same year in which he had just seized power, 1939. With the rest of Europe already engulfed in World War II and thanks to the new discovery chemist, Franco could come to think that the conquest of the world was just around the corner.

A story meticulously presented by Martínez de Pisón, a tasty intrahistory about survival, ingenuity and occurrence all materialized in Albert Von Filek.

Filek. The scammer who deceived Franco
5/5 - (6 votes)

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