The Madrid writer Aroa Moreno Duran is lavished on a kind of intimacy inserted in historical fictions. Or at least towards that hybrid point the first and memorable novels of his that break after having published other non-fiction or poetry books. But the narrative assignment is not limited to easy sentimentality, so to speak. Because the times that his characters inhabit are marked by painful circumstances, by scenarios where existentialism is unloaded like prodigious unexpected downpours.
And it is that History, what happened in any past time is better visualized from intrahistories such as those presented to us by authors such as Aroa. Peeking into their stories is accompanying some characters who give their all with furious credibility in the face of adversity that awaken feelings of alienation, of estrangement even in the closest environments.
A nascent novelistic facet that seems to summarize the lyrical point of the poet with the arduous task of the biographer. Her lucky characters are thus capable of transmitting visions that reach the descriptive from the depths of the soul.
Top 3 recommended books by Aroa Moreno Durán
low tide
There is something about the low tide of the northern seas of disconcerting beauty. On one side, cliffs emerge into view, marked in perpetuity by the bravery of the waves, while the beaches extend in their pyrrhic victory over the rest of the ocean. The set of a Cantabrian low tide awakens that notion of an endless battlefield between land and water. Imperishable comings and goings that mark the future of the inhabitants of those parts.
Adirane returns to her family home in her town by the estuary, in the north of the Basque Country, with the fragile excuse of recording her grandmother Ruth's last childhood memory during the Civil War. She has left her husband and her five-year-old daughter behind, without even an explanation, to try to find a new starting point from her own past. Adriana, her mother, also lives in her house, with whom she has not spoken for years.
What does it mean to raise or care for someone under three very different historical and political contexts and in an almost permanently tense territory? In this novel, mothers and daughters from different generations will weave, with the rhythm and force of the tides, a genealogy shaken by family secrets and confrontations that until now have kept them apart, living lives separated by the walls of what has never been known. He says.
the communist's daughter
Faced with the notion that there is no country or borders, the idea of ​​the abandoned land, of the one-way journey of the stateless, of uprooting from ideologies. Narrating from a void can end up providing the most intensely lyrical sensation. Romanticism in essence is longing for the impossible and trying to return to the places where you left happily. When all that is impossible.
Berlin, 1956. On the coldest afternoon of the winter, a girl's hands get dirty with coal. Berlin, 1958. In those same hands there is a secret or a memory, a badge with three engraved letters: PCE. Berlin, 1961. The blood of the sardines has remained on the other side because a wall has divided the city in two. Berlin, 1968. Have you thought about what it means to be here forever? Berlin, 1971. What things do you take on trips, when you run away, when a return will not be possible.
Katia's life could have been told in many ways, but Aroa Moreno Durán's prose, incisive and brilliant, tells us this way: restoring beauty to the weight of History.
Frida Kahlo. Live life
You can only write biographies of exciting characters. Or at least it should just be like that. Opposite works that atone for and even extol second-class personalities, works like this one to make suffering known as a creative residue and as a sublimation of the tragic towards color and splendor.
En Frida Kahlo. Live life, the Spanish journalist Aroa Moreno Durán approaches one of the best-known Mexican artists of the XNUMXth century. This is the story of overcoming a brave woman, ahead of her time, who suffered and lived with intensity and who, moreover, was able to transform her perpetual pain and her illness into art. The strength, as well as the character of Frida Kahlo, are an example of what the struggle for life means. This, together with her work, has made the Mexican artist an icon for the entire Spanish-speaking world.
