The 3 best books by Sergio del Molino

Back in 2004 they interviewed me at Heraldo de Aragón for the release of one of my novels. I was so excited about the promise of a full page back cover. So I came and met a young man Sergio del Molino, with his recorder, his pen and his notebook. Behind closed doors in a small room, that languid interview with an unappealing assignment ended as usually happens in those cases in which the character is not the idol of the journalist on duty, a cold assignment.

Yes, that boy, somewhat younger than me, didn't exactly seem like the joy of the garden. I guess because he was starting his profession as a journalist, or because he didn't feel like interviewing a Mindundi writer like me, or because he was carrying a hangover, or just because.

The point is that when Sergio started with his questions, his introductions, his associations and so on, I already discovered that he knew a lot about literature. The fact is that that back cover for a budding writer always made it easier for me to remember his name and his face as a hungover or absolutely professional young journalist, depending on the paradigm of journalist that each one evokes.

Quite a few years have passed and now he is the one who undergoes many more interviews here and there, with more or less harsh journalists to discuss a literary work already openly recognized. So today it is my turn to review those books by the author that I consider the best of his creation.

Top 3 recommended books by Sergio del Molino

The violet hour

If there is a book by this author that goes beyond the literary to reach a much greater human dimension, without a doubt this is it. Surviving a child is a fact against nature, the cruelest of events for logic and human feeling.

I cannot imagine as a father what it must mean to lose that bond not only with the most faithful love but with the idea of ​​the future. Something must break inside when something like this happens.

And writing a book for a child who is not there should suppose an indescribable exercise towards an impossible cure, towards a minimum relief or in search of the transcendental placebo of what is written, like pages that will last in a time that belonged more to the son of the writer in question. (I certainly know more than one who faced this task of writing, a solitary activity where there is any, even more so in the face of absences of such deep echoes).

Of course, one cannot delve into the fundamentals that guide a narrative like this, but the truth is that that violet hour, which develops between grief and the need for survival, finds in its first pages a reflective preamble that rounds off the history of the uncertainty before the inevitable death and the assumption of its final arrival.

It is to start reading and face the sincerity of a language that strikes between metaphors and rhetorical questions that collide with the most cruel of destinies.

The violet hour

Empty Spain

In his novel What Nobody Cares, and under a great work of investigation intuited in the profusion of details, Sergio del Molino offered a scenography between the manners and the satirical.

In this essay he rescues that notion of Spain that under the dictatorship was socially and morally counter-current, but which in essence repeated the flight from rural to urban, turning towns into dark redoubts of a demographic well that was difficult to recover. The migratory effect of leaving the towns continues to this day, despite the great possibilities of connectivity for all kinds of issues.

The analysis of this book lays the foundations to understand the magnitude of depopulation that turns some inland areas into true deserts of civilization.

Decadence can also have its charm, and that empty Spain gave much of itself to compose a literary and even cinematographic imaginary that contrasted with the other urban reality. But the sad current reality is that empty Spain seems to give no more of itself.

Empty Spain

The look of the fish

Empty Spain, Sergio del Molino's previous book, presented us with a devastated, rather than devastating, perspective on the evolution of a country that went from economic misery to a kind of moral misery.

And I emphasize the devastated perspective because the exodus of the people from the towns to the city occurred with blind inertia, like that of the donkey and the carrot ... And suddenly, from those muds, these muds arrive.

Empty Spain presented us with the figure of Antonio Aramayona, a professor of philosophy disenchanted with the contradictions of living and about to exit from the forum of this world. From him branched out that now mythical essay that came out last year.

Well, that suddenly, in this new book The look of the fish, Antonio Aramayona returns to literary life with greater prominence. The teacher's teachings on integrity, progress, the need to always claim the unfair and respect for oneself, fit perfectly with a practically autobiographical space of the author.

Youth is what they have, impregnated with all those good principles transmitted by the appropriate person, driven by little more than common sense, respect and their own truth, ends up being stamped with a reality that awaits a maturity already redirected towards conventionalism and its opportunism.

In the end there is a point of recognition of the betrayal that is to grow and mature. Everything that was agreed in blood in youth ends up smearing like wet ink on the pages of our own books. There is always anger, and the notion that at any moment, if luck bets, we will go back to being, in part, everything we were.

The look of the fish

Other recommended books by Sergio del Molino

A certain Gonzalez

Forty years have passed since the first triumph of the socialist party in the general elections (October 1982) and the coming to power of a young Sevillian lawyer, Felipe González, who in 2022 has reached the age of eighty.

A certain González narrates a crucial moment in the history of Spain: the Transition, following the biographical thread of its great protagonist. The figure of Felipe González is the backbone of the story, but his focus is a Spain that passes in less than a generation from mass and the single party to advanced democracy and complete European integration. A biography documented with first-hand testimonies, chronicles, a newspaper library and the pulse of a narrator who has told the Spain of today like no one else.

A certain Gonzalez
5/5 - (7 votes)

1 comment on “The 3 best books by Sergio del Molino”

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.