The 3 best books of Hernán Rivera Letelier

The landscapes that one collects mark. More in the case of a writer. The point is that the landscapes of Hernan Rivera Leteier They offer us a diaphanous glimpse of nothingness from which protagonists appear, offering their existence to the most merciless weather. The terroir is appreciated, however alienating it may be in the case of the Chilean Atacama desert. And when one returns to his place after a thousand trips, the known is admired with that strange fullness and magnetism of the telluric.

The Atacama desert spreads over Chile like a secret behind the Andes. An indomitable territory where the usual heat of the deserts does not even reach. Because from its minimum of 2.000 meters it is not a usual desert. With that "eccentric" space as a reference, the fact that Hernán Rivera Letelier became the fascinating writer that he is makes more sense.

Letelier's narrative essence strikes with an undeniable authenticity. mixture of realism raw to which the world made into a plateau invites, with the future of some characters that explode between the alienating madness of possible existential oases on the horizon. The matter is completed with a good dose of imagination as a resource to reinvent a life subjected to the invariable 360-degree look at nothing. Because every traveler is impacted by the Atacama desert, but inhabiting that place supposes a necessary surrender to the imagination as a forced catharsis from a place erected towards the sky by the whims of the orography.

Top 3 recommended novels by Hernán Rivera Letelier

the art of resurrection

The reason that Quixote was abandoned among the Iberian moors has its replica in this modern story. If it was Che Guevara who said that the three madmen in history had been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote and himself, in this novel I would find a reply to his hypothesis. Because Jesus Christ is back to convince us all of his predictions and the visions of him from a saltpeter pampa more than ever surprising.

Domingo Zárate Vega began to notice apocalyptic shapes in the clouds and to be correct in predicting small disasters. After the death of his mother, he becomes a hermit in the Elqui Valley, where he discovers, through a vision, that he is nothing less than the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

When in 1942 he finds out that a prostitute lives in the Providencia office who venerates the Virgen del Carmen and who is also called Magalena, he goes looking for her with the purpose of making her his disciple and lover, and together they spread the word about the imminent arrival of the end. of the world.

The Chilean desert and the saltpeter works punished by the sun are the hostile places where the illuminated one, better known as the Christ of Elqui, will cause a stir among the locals with his holy sermons.

The kidnapping of Sister Tegualda

There is also room for suspense in the desert bounded between the Andes and the Pacific. A great story that leads us to the unique Antofagasta, the city overlooking the ocean and converted into the nerve center of all business in the region.

The only private detective in the city of Antofagasta now faces his most personal and intimate case: after discovering his true feelings towards Sister Tegualda in Havana, someone decides to take revenge and kidnaps her. El Tira begins an anguished march through his hometown, following his new girlfriend, following the clues and traps left for him through enigmatic letters. A desperate march that takes us to the heart of one of the most endearing characters of the great writer of the pampas. A throbbing novel, full of sensuality and mystery.

Queen Elizabeth sang rancheras

The peerless Queen Isabella, legendary and emblematic prostitute of the Chilean Pampas, spent her youth offering her services on paydays. She went from saltpeter to saltpeter until she reached La Oficina, which would be the last active mining operation.

Now that she has died, the Ambulance, the Malanoche, the Stone Bed, the Two Point Four, the Poet Mizzen and the Astronaut, all of them members of an unusual group of harlots and disinherited who knew and loved her, gather to pay tribute to the memory of an endearing woman, the one who tenderly listened to the troubles of bitter loves and generously comforted singles and married people as if each one of them were the only man in her life.

Queen Elizabeth, who seduces and thrills as only exceptional characters can do, inhabits the same world as Hildebrando del Carmen, the young protagonist of Anthem of the Angel Standing on One Leg (Planeta, 1997). That unusual and distant world, which comes to life as the narrative progresses, will end up becoming a universal and mythical place. All the men who loved the whore queen of the poor.