There are writers delighted to have met. Narrators convinced of their plots as true masterpieces of literary architecture. Then there are other types of writers who make of the trade that sincere exercise of prospecting the soul and projection of the imagination.
For which it never hurts to equip yourself with the tools that make it easier for the imagination to waste energy. Afterwards, everything flows and irony can allow itself to be manipulated by humor, while surrealism runs amok over the undoubted.
Frenzy of ideas and sensations in that dark room that is the world. Unspeakable delights with a literature that does not go with squeamishness or narrow plots.
I have not yet named the author in question. She is Cristina Sanchez Andrade and his bibliography is always a pleasant encounter with the existentialism more determined to leave nothing behind, to be just that at all.
The light and the heavy. The most fleeting time from which life flows more and more uncontrollably until the eternal second that never advances either due to extreme happiness or unaffordable melancholy. Reflections of existence from the everyday to what may be transcendental in our passage through the world.
Very specific scenarios and characters that are easy to accommodate in your skin and yet also fantasies or at least symbols as if created in dreams. A highly recommended author.
Top 3 recommended novels by Cristina Sánchez Andrade
The boy who ate wool
As paradoxical as it sounds, when you first select a book of short stories by any writer, you are confirming your worth in short-distance literature. Because the stories are that dog-face confrontation in the ring; or that fleeting kiss of casual lovers; or that discovery of the first things so unfairly brief. The eternal is precisely more accessible when read in one sitting.
A boy traumatized by the disappearance of his lamb begins to eat wool, which he vomits in the form of balls; a nursemaid dreams of emigrating to America while she supports the milk using a puppy; a marquis is given false teeth of dubious origin; a child has his tonsils removed, which end up as a trophy; a castaway manages to survive thanks to an unspeakable secret; an old woman makes an unprecedented decision after the death of her husband; An office worker selects a girlfriend from a catalogue, who in the end turns out not to be the woman he dreamed of... These are some of the quirky protagonists of the juicy stories gathered in this volume.
Moving between the macabre and the ironic, between the fable and the grotesque, the crudest realism and the wildest fantasy, these stories are an excellent example of the particular, inimitable and stimulating literary universe of Cristina Sánchez-Andrade.
They show rural Galicia, deep Spain, farce scenes, bizarre characters and impossible situations. Death, sex, greed, daydreams, deceptions and disappointments appear, but also the occasional crime, grotesque touches, macabre touches and a very peculiar, hilarious and sometimes disturbing humor.
The author, who has already left evidence of the power of her personal voice in wonderful novels such as Winters y someone under the eyelids, Here he demonstrates a prodigious mastery of the short distance with stories that seduce and surprise, full of unexpected turns. Deliciously perverse tales, disturbingly funny, perfidiously suggestive.
The nostalgia of the amphibian woman
How would Sabina, "there is no nostalgia worse than longing for what never, ever happened." Behind the curtain of reality, legends make up that kind of nostalgic epic that magnifies facts or makes them rarer. In the end there is a compendium on both sides of the facts. Cristina's literature is responsible in this case for filling everything with that magical final sensation of what has been experienced in other skins to feel that everything is true, tragically true.
The old woman Lucha is about to be killed by her husband before the astonished look of her granddaughter. The origin of the rancor accumulated over decades dates back to the early hours of January 2, 1921. The young Lucha lived through the shipwreck of the steam Santa Isabel at the mouth of the Arousa estuary, opposite the island of Sálvora. While the men celebrated the arrival of the new year, the women faced alone the rescue of the castaways by throwing themselves into the sea with their dornas.
They were considered heroines, but rumors were also heard about not-so-epic behaviors, in which greed and pillage coexisted. That night Lucha went to the beach dressed as a bride: she was dragging her long hair, and she let confusion lead her in front of a naked castaway but wearing a top hat. Who was she? An English musician or the devil incarnate? Why did Lucha end up naked like him? What happened that day will mark her life, that of her daughter and also that of her granddaughter.
The combination of a historical fact of enormous repercussion in its day, with fiction allows Cristina Sanchez-Andrade take a unique journey through three generations of women from a small fishing community full of memorable characters (such as the enigmatic hippie Stardust, or the prudish Jesusa).
Once again, the author expertly mixes the crudest realism with surreal delirium, summoning accurate aromas of the tremendous This unfortunatly , the magical realism of Cunqueiro and the grotesque of Valle-Inclan. The result is a fascinating novel: a reflection on memory involving secrets and jealousy, collective guilt and female desire; a challenge to the reader, written with technical skill and exceptional prose, capable of creating a hypnotic game that does not end until the last page.
someone under the eyelids
There are those who emphasize love as the apple of the eye. But nothing more valuable than what is located on the eyelids when we squeeze them to escape the blinding light or when they become the stage where dreams take place. Because those are the ones that always remain, as impossible and uncontrollable as true in the interim from the awakening until the arrival of the overwhelming reason.
Two old women, Olvido Fandiño and her maid Bruna, decide to go on a journey, one last journey. They will do it in an old Volkswagen beetle, in whose trunk they introduce a suspicious package that looks like a corpse. Doña Olvido will drive, who is the proud holder of the first driver's license issued to a female in the city of Santiago for a reason.
Both women (who have spent half their lives together, fight all day but do not know how to live without each other) form a strange couple. They were united forever by a terrible event from the past: an event related to Olvido's marriage to a lawyer with Galician sympathies, his eccentric family – which includes a doll-collecting brother who makes mysterious trips to Paris and a maniacal mother. of bacilli and cleaning– and the love affairs of the housemaid, against the background of the outbreak of the civil war and the Galician rural world.
On his last trip (which may also be to the past, with its load of hatred and memories, and perhaps in search of that "someone" under the eyelids) mishaps and varied encounters will follow one another: with a television reporter interested in interviewing Mrs. Olvido because she supposedly met Álvaro Cunqueiro, or with a couple of civil guards who will help them in the search for Bruna's false teeth, which have been thrown out the window.
between the grotesque and the road movie senile, this wacky novel with macabre touches narrates the escape of two women who are a mixture of Thelma and Louise and the endearing and fearsome old women of arsenic for pity in Galician version. Because Olvido and Bruna leave behind a trail of corpses both in the present and in the past. Cristina Sánchez-Andrade forges two unforgettable characters whom she subjects to a maddened, hilarious and bleakly human experience.
I have read the nostalgia of the amphibious woman and it is simply beautiful