There are few writers who have the incomparable virtue of filling the most profound ideas with brilliant symbols and images that link the deepest ideas like light literary goldsmith. Manuel Rivas It is one of them. And it often happens that these authors give themselves fruitfully to the story even more than to the novel. Thus, the cases of storytellers from my land such as Patricia esteban u Oscar Sipan, to compare between the close.
It will be something that the encounter with that inspiration towards the most fruitful synthesis can be exhausting. Unapproachable to build a story so extensive and loaded with that sensory power. Or perhaps it is because the brief facilitates this task of magical synthesis in tune with the formal boundedness of the matter.
Be that as it may, the point is that once again we are faced with one of those expected novelties of Manuel Rivas, with his metaphysical harmony from an existentialism at times crude, always melancholic and ultimately tremendously human.
Living without permission and other stories of the West brings us closer to that Spanish West, the author's cradle, that Galicia in which the world ends, as the Romans already blindly knew before knowing, more certainly, that the world continued beyond the ocean.
And with that touch of Galician idiosyncrasy we go through the narratives of The fear of the hedgehogs, Living without permission and Sagrado Mar. Three short novels that recover old sins of the Galician coasts turned into berths of lost destinations; Destinations delivered to the black markets where life ends up darkening and where any search for freedom is constrained by injustice and violence, crossing a more abrupt path that ascends between the cliffs towards that same place where everything ends, as they blindly knew the Romans…
A volume that exudes that greater authenticity of fiction from the proximity of the author. Some stories that detail specific lives but that expose us all to the frankest doubts about what we can do with ourselves when our fate seems to be heading towards perdition in any of its representations, be it guilt, heartbreak, uprooting or any other side effects of the living drug.
You can now buy Living without permission and other stories from the West, the new book by Manuel Rivas, here: