The first replica (due to the seismic nature of discovering a great author) of the work of sigrid nunez in Spain it came from the reference of another great author and friend of hers, nothing less than Susan Sontag. And fortunately the synergy ended up bearing fruit in this approach to a bibliography of Sigrid without waste for lovers of transcendent literature. This type of stories on the threshold between life, death, their meanings and their values. Because hovering around these arguments precisely enhance essential vitalism, the urgency to live.
And that in order to fully understand the scope of his books, it would be necessary to recover novels, stories and essays prior to that landing in the Spanish language for the cause. Everything will go. The question in the meantime is to enjoy intimate stories, loaded with that realism capable of covering us with its mimicry to inhabit other souls. An effort that seems to be the leitmotif, the musical cadence of his works to make resilience a common ground, a human essence.
Only the most gifted writers are capable of developing this type of plots that they narrate with the most impressionism soaked in the sensations and emotions of their protagonists. This is how they make everything happen, that reality spills over to us with the fresh authenticity, of proximity and even touch, of confidence with the characters.
Top 3 recommended novels by Sigrid Nunez
Friend
The protagonist and narrator of this novel is a New York writer who unexpectedly loses her great friend and mentor, and in no less unexpected way is forced to take care of her dog - a huge and arthritic Great Dane - who has become left alone and traumatized by the sudden disappearance of his master. The protagonist will have no choice but to take him to her tiny apartment, risking being thrown out because animals are prohibited in the building. And so, against the background of the mourning for the friend and the master who disappeared in tragic circumstances, the unique and beautiful story of the friendship between a lonely writer and a dog that has been left without an owner will unfold ...
The book - winner of the National Book Award, instant and surprising bestseller and unanimously praised by critics - is indeed a novel, but inside it contains many genres and registers: because the personal diary also appears; the diary in which literary anecdotes and quotes from authors such as Virginia Woolf, JR Ackerley or Kundera follow one another; and meditation on the pain of loss, love, loneliness, sexuality, contemporary society, writing, women, men and dogs ...
A perhaps unclassifiable text that seduces with its diaphanous ability to approach important issues with great sensitivity, with a measured prose and full of elegance. The result is dazzling and moving, one of those rare books that accompany the reader forever.
What is your torment
The narrator of this story is someone who knows how to listen, because she understands that everyone needs to be listened to, and that virtue will be fundamental in the situation that she will have to face. And it is that in the center of this novel there are two friends. And a disease.
The narrator visits a friend who suffers from terminal cancer in the hospital and decides to settle in with her at home to accompany her in her last days. The two talk, watch movies, read, reminisce about childhood, laugh and talk about their complicated and not always satisfying personal relationships. And as the end of the patient draws near, the two women will have to face the decision they have agreed to ...
Sigrid Nunez, who has already demonstrated her immense talent for portraying the pain of loss without falling into cheating sentimentality in the wonderful Friend, return here to enter complex territories. Drawing on great subtlety, with touches of humor and an enormous reflective capacity, he addresses the end of life and the assumption of death, and in doing so he gives us a moving and courageous book. What is your torment It is an extraordinary novel, but, above all, it is a tribute to the transformative power of empathy and friendship.
Always susan
One day in 1976, a young aspiring writer, Sigrid Nunez, walks through the door of 340 Riverside Drive, the apartment where Susan Sontag lives, writes, loves and thinks, one of the great icons of the American intelligentsia, a figure legendary thanks to its controversial essays, its overflowing intelligence and its very personal style.
This first meeting would change the life of Nunez, who would end up living in the same apartment with Sontag by becoming a couple with her only child. The three would, for some time, form a family as unique as it was controversial. Sontag was, according to Sigrid Nunez, "a natural mentor."
In these moving and lucid memories, she speaks to us with subtlety and gratitude of those years, and describes with extraordinary insight the daily and academic environment that surrounded Sontag, her emotional and intellectual life, or the effect and reactions that this extraordinary woman caused. when he published a new book, he gave a lecture or simply walked into a room.
