BOOKS AND AUTHORS​

Prensa Ibérica, April 25, 2024

In the hands of an intelligent publisher, a book or an animal can be an elegant colorful evolution. The pages are bound to support a certain ideographic order and, at the same time, to support shelves of lives and concerns. The genetic imprint is portrayed on the paper of the biographies from the title page. Autobiographies drive themselves between egos, even in the opposite direction. Authors become thousands of characters in novels and end up being too many people to recognize themselves. Books, like newspapers, are one of those rare things that we writers put up with.

With the literary man, one is moved by his own intention, which aims at the immortality of his work, of his characters, of his landscape, of himself. Thus, when one meets an Argentine writer, one believes to discover all the culture accumulated in a single conspicuous, serious reader, perhaps also supreme ego. A German also seems to have read everything, alone and for himself, so that he concludes adapting the world, after thinking about it, to his circumstances. An Indian writer delves deep, philosophizes and ends up transforming everything into almost danceable poetry. An Englishman knows everything English and crowns the world of creation as an imperial property seated on the throne of useful genius. An American thinks to create and creates to win. A Frenchman thinks, harmonizes, revolutionizes and has the possibility to digress in his chauvinism. An African understands the tribal rumblings of philosophy stuck to the most human ground. A Spaniard makes history but neglects it after elevating the language to the most beautiful and versatile poetic subtlety. The subjective is to be said with the possibility of a reversibility or other readings.

The authors, one or the other, without any possible slippage, create worlds. It is up to the reader to let himself be carried away by the cadence of a narration, of an adventure, of a story, of a drama, of a comedy or of a poem, and to dance, of course, unfailingly to the rhythm of the composer. The author determines, unless one chooses to reinterpret or imaginatively version what is written. That is the freedom of the one and of the other, the freedom to wander through invented or reinterpretable geographies, neuronal or physical, which in any case are randomly bifurcated based on the demands of a plot, the requirements of a character or the mood.

In what has been said, the sinuous melody of a style resounds, the significant flow that directs the free will through the enigmatic routes of a story, of personal or warlike battles, through a reality invented or created out of nothing. This is the inspired miracle of memory, of recreation, of evidence, of analysis, and even of magic, truth or humor itself.

When writing or reading we accentuate the prospecting of sharpness. With them we want to reduce the world piece by piece to recompose it again with whim. Starting from a portion, we annex everything to the authenticity we long for. A book is an ideal and provisional recomposition with fragments of that colossal puzzle that is life, and at the same time it allows us to transcend reality, it discovers it and lends it to us, it transports us in the present to other times and places, different, close, non-existent, it gives us invented beings or not. It is a precious object, a unique creation of a generally recognizable and contextualized author, something that is not ready to become a museum piece, it is possibly also the human discovery that comes closest to the infinite, to what deserves to be eternal.

Books and characters have ended up supporting authors thanks to the fact that they have recreated them. It is a sort of happy inbreeding.

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ALBERTO BARCIELA, Spanish journalist, is vice-president of EditoRed.

This text was originally published in Prensa Ibérica, with whose authorization we reproduce it.