In that Latin American literature (cited this way to frame the most notable authors who beautify Castilian, Spanish or whatever you want to freely call it in these times of unexpected censorship), we find Rodrigo Rey Rosa as one of those firm bastions in defense of that cleanliness. , fixed and ultimate splendor of this language that allows us to understand so many...
The question is how and what to transmit with it. That is the mission of authors like Rodrigo Rey Rosa, capable of the substance from the structure, the argument but also from the form. Because the highest meaning is the one that summarizes all the foothills of language to launch a more complete message. Essential humanity, a tool (language) as a differential fact to feel that there are still souls among moral and technological involutions that undoubtedly exist.
Juicy stories from the brevity of the story with evocations of Borges even the most disturbing novel with a suspense that reaches the existential compared to other "trivialities" of black genres and others. A reference writer in our days who must always be kept track of.
Top 3 recommended books by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
The human material
In order to chronicle magnetic events for an author like Rodrigo Rey Rosa, he visited the La Isla Archive daily and immersed himself in the labyrinth of millions of files and files that the Guatemalan police had accumulated for decades. The political and social implication of the violence unleashed in each dictatorial process has in this case an aftertaste of a complete vision like that of the researcher's diary, mixed with that hint of semblance that the plot imports from the novelistic.
What began as a kind of entertainment gradually led to a risky investigation in which the documentation of repression in his country became fictional material. From the five notebooks and four notebooks written during those visits, The Human Material emerges, an overwhelming thriller with a macabre backdrop.
Severine
There is no healthy love, Don Quixote knew it well. In this case there is no exception in terms of feelings that are not yet reciprocated, but for which they are expected as if there were no other destiny in life. Because love can dangerously materialize in the imagination, beyond mundane denials or moments that do not complement each other...
A loving delirium. This is how the author defines this novel, in which the monotonous existence of a bookseller is shaken by the emergence of an accomplished book thief. As in an obsessive dream in which the boundaries between the rational and the irrational are blurred, the protagonist delves deeper into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Severina and the equivocal relationship she maintains with her mentor, whom she presents as her grandfather. while she hopes that the list of stolen books will help her understand the enigma of her life. Rodrigo Rey Rosa has created a disturbing novel about the simultaneously alienating and liberating power of love, which confirms its privileged place in contemporary literature.
1986. Complete stories
It is easier, in the case of an author like Rodrigo Rey, to compose a volume of stories. Because the level of depth of each profile and scene brings all the characters closer, taking them to Dantesque scenography of existence between hells or heavens, far beyond their disparate passage through the more or less distant world...
Very few authors manage to master the genre of the story, close to poetry due to its brevity and impact and of which Cortázar, Bioy Casares or Borges are the great masters in the Spanish language: Rodrigo Rey Rosa is at the level of those classics. Disturbing, sensual, distressing and full of suspense, they leave the reader absorbed after reading them, as if he woke up from a dream or a shock. Reading each of these stories, belonging to six different books, up to the last ones, unpublished and very recently written, is a singular experience, close to an unexpected journey. The tour also traces a literary portrait of the evolution of a unique author.
Other recommended books by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
Metempsychosis
The conflicts of the mind, the dilemmas and the parallel journeys between reality and fiction, both shaped by the needs of experiences. The question is how each one writes his story between the crooked lines of God (wink to Torcuato Luca from Tena and his great novel brought to Netflix exceptionally…). On this occasion there is no split personality but reality folded in on itself to the point of suffocation...
A writer wakes up in a large room with large windows overlooking the sea, a white and quiet room from which he cannot leave. He is in a psychiatric hospital in Greece and doesn't remember anything, but on his nightstand he finds a manuscript that explains how he got there. He had spent several days wandering around Athens, trying to translate some ancient documents protected by two sinister brothers and talking about life after death with a wanderer dressed in a philosopher's robe in the middle of winter.
When he finally improves, his psychiatrist decides to send him and an old acquaintance to investigate an ancient and persecuted religion that preaches the migration of souls. In that area of the world it would be possible to believe in eternal life again, but the love of young Jaín can put even the sanest mind at risk.
