Literature has a chance to save us. It is no longer a question of thinking about libraries where our children's children can consult the thought, science and knowledge deposited in books as a patent of an inevitable involution. We know that nothing will be left sooner than later. That is why the lyrics have to stop looking for arguments and science to start dancing. I mean that salvation. Juicy paragraphs or vibrant verses; impossible turns with ballerina feet about the end of the world to the beat of an icy Wagner symphony.
Agustin Fernandez Mallo makes his letters sign a declaration of last wills. The black on white legacy of a civilization that leaves nothing useful, except the hurtful idea that what was important was only love. The beautiful, what remains is the ephemeral. The awareness of this final effect is as lucid as it is ravishing. Because it brings us closer to the horizon, to utopia by setting foot on the Ithaca of Ulysses and Kavafis. Except that it also shows that all previous voyages made little sense.
Beyond the famous Greek island as an allegory, nowhere better to delve into these ideas than a city like Venice. Always adorned with that decadence of saltpeter, rust and verdigris. Where beauty, elegance but also melancholy and deterioration are combined awakening notions of the ephemeral, of a possible final arrival of the sea that engulfs everything as a fascinating Atlantis of our days.
Venice sometime in the XNUMXst century. Humanity is heading, unknowingly, to collapse as a couple roam the city, oblivious to the signs that herald the end of society as we know it. He is a Latin teacher and is on a sabbatical; she is a writer and works on an essay about love. Both are destined to play a critical role in the transition to a new world.
The book of all loves offers a new look on a universal theme and investigates the different dynamics that love adopts, both in the intimate sphere of the couple and in other aspects of public life, such as politics, economics or science. Playing with styles and genres, skillfully mixing fiction, poetry and essays, Agustín Fernández Mallo has written a fascinating philosophical novel that is radically committed to hope from the dystopia of the present.
You can now buy the novel «The book of all loves », by Agustín Fernández Mallo, here:
