French Invitation Card

The girl on the fridge

M and I'm tired of your blog, Don Rafael. As heard only good reviews of books memorable. So any ...

- Sorry, but ... Who are you?

- A literary critic of the old ones. Call me Don Mariano.

- Nice to meet you, Don Mariano. Well see, if you explain better ...

- Enter your review is only Nobel Prize winners, great works of literature and other undisputed wonders of writing. So any criticism. Get involved with a book Peñaza, to see if he can sharpen. Just read the good oxidizing mind, I tell you.

- But well I did not put that book Martin Garzo ...

- Offal, standing out well, I do not believe he did not like.

- Well, wait to make memory.

- No, I remember. No bad review. And is that any risks with their reading. Have not read Peñaza?

- Well, yes, but is that as I avoid ...

- I knew already. Nothing Spring Awards, Metro and stuff. Nothing Vatican medieval mysteries and conspiracies ... no civil war ... you are a hoax. Have to put up with whatever comes, Don Rafael. Let's pleasures and read something risky. Take a walk on the wild side and read something questionable for once. To see if you are going to be timid ...

- Do you mean coward?

- More or less, you understand. I am one of those before, my friend!

Following the request of Don Mariano, I recognize a few weeks ago I took a chance. I just finished a book of short stories, The girl on the fridge and other stories of Etgar Keret.

Keret is an Israeli and was born in 1967. By that time we have risk. Learn to read the back cover is a versatile writer who has done scripts for film and television, graphic novel and, especially, stories. Very short stories. Chilling stories about, incomprehensible other, but do not leave indifferent.

One would like to think that because of the foray in the audiovisual world, the stories move in the world of video and new avant-garde art.

- This promises, Don Rafael. Sorry, did not interrupt more.

Thanks. Keret, indeed, tries to enter a literary world that asks us to innovation and developments. His youth required and in some ways it succeeds. Their accounts, although many of them reflect the life exhasperante that citizens are housed in one of the most violent corners of the globe, could be located anywhere in the world. Because there are men everywhere haunted and daunted by what surrounds them. These stories are the result of today's society, run by a few politicians that lead us as puppets of a conflict to another.

- Do not go friend, that I did not ask for much.

Do not worry, already over. Another series of stories of children treated from a very particular view. From the standpoint of the child. I have often wondered why kids have them removed from the literature. I mean, the main works of the twentieth century appear few children. Many adolescents have written much of puberty, sexual awakening, the coming to adulthood. But for children, with their individual projects rather than as an adult, just been mentioned.

has built a literary world for them, and they belong there, isolated from infants stories that do not necessarily have to be maudlin. Take this opportunity to include children's books including Roald Dahl, from among the best that our children can read. It seems that writers do not know or perceive that children have feelings and that they can flow many passions and fears, which are simple machines that quickly forget and forgive. Can have extreme cruelty, which is sometimes excused on the grounds that they are children, making it doubly cruel and causing the result of the impunity that many take advantage. I read once that had musicologists who did not understand how Mozart could compose a piece child with so much feeling and delicacy, when his soul could not have matured, when I could not understand the outbursts of love (read sex) and human cruelty.

is true, and I share, that a number of sensations that a child may not have been ... but an adult either. I am sure that children are more sensitive than many adults, and of course, sentimental plot complexity can be huge, more than adults, which simplify and forget the confusion a child may suffer. The child's world is far different but not devoid of feelings and suspicions are subject to the dictatorship of the elderly, the cruelty of "when you are older you'll understand" and the hardness of "because I say so." Being a child is not easy, and only a few authors (it occurs to me now, in addition to Dahl, Ana Maria Matute) have taken advantage of that distant world of our childhood, but in fact is of tremendous importance to our lives, if we pay attention to what psychologists.

- I can not go around the bush. Another

set of stories in this book corresponds to a response to a possible vacuum interior or exterior nonsense. The regression of the absurdities of the world to the world of the absurd. They are stories that have reminded me Julio Cortázar, especially A picture, which is a recreation of the world wonder Cortazarian. In short, a set of reports of irregular quality, varied in theme and content, giving enough thought. All written in straightforward language of today's society, television or comments on the street. It forms a light literature, but profound in meaning.

- I already see it coming ... they also liked the book ...

Sorry, Don Mariano. You know that I have really good heart. Keret is a writer admired and recognized despite his abusive youth. In its website can find several of his stories translated into English ...

- I am outraged gentleman.

- I can not put so ... Do not you think we tuteemos?

- HOW SAY YOU?

Hotel Vip Welcome Letter

A major novelist

ndres A Ibáñez, in the ABC of the arts and literature, says that it is very difficult to write novels More than three hundred pages. That can be a writer of short stories, poet and short story much more easily than great novels. After Commendation thick book, and get that José Luis finished giving me the reason, could agree to that statement. To write long novels (and other than a mess, that is) must have a special ability. Anyone can write a sonnet on a spring day, and every poet has a poem great. But to approach the daunting task of writing a novel approach voluminous is the glory of Olympus. Provided that the work they deserve.

Ibáñez Anyway, falls into a kind of tautology: the voluminous writer of novels is the best novel writers if contains voluminous enough literary quality. Basically I agree that a great novel is where the great writer observed, possibly genius. But little else. Because novels is precisely what seems to be able to write any. Anyone who knows what springs to write a successful novel. A computer can easily write the review of one of these novels (recently you can add names and more personalized). Would not surprise me that one of these days a seasoned programmer, resentful at being dismissed from the NASA budget cuts in the nth administration Bush, to develop the ultimate software for writing best-selling soap operas .

Orhan Pamuk is certainly one of the authors touched by the muses, holder of heavenly grace to write a voluminous tome worthy of accolades worldwide. I refer to "Snow", a huge novel in form and substance. Its structure is as impressive and has a series of parallel actions, as curtains or transparent theatrical scenery, who tell us many stories all related. From time to time, the storm rolled her action all those curtains, among us, blending in an explosion of feelings and passions. Pamuk not only describes the profound paradox of Turkey, both secular and Muslim, home of the late commander of the believers of Islam, but a story of love and trust, loneliness and regret, full of idealism and reality.

The main character is Ka, a Turkish resident in Germany, a political exile who returns to Turkey on grounds more or less hidden, but among them is that of finding a wife. Ka travels to Kars to supposedly make a report about the suicide of a women protesting the ban on wearing the traditional veil Turkish. This trip serves Ka to enter into the Turkish society, divided between the secular republican sentiment and Islamic religious. Ka also is divided between his Europeanism and quality of Turkish among his loneliness and fear the pain of rejection. Ka travels in the mystical journey of life towards a world full of complications, away from the Eden of indifference in Frankfurt where installed in the routine lives, poverty and loneliness.

In Turkey, they decided, is to take sides, must live or die, you can not attend unperturbed development of the terrible events that will occur in Kars, between the relative tranquility of the citizens, who lives in fear of Islamic revolution but distrustful of official nationalist regime. Kars is cut off by snow (in Turkish Kar) and therefore separate external life, in a parenthesis necessarily space-time where the argument has to be resolved. Ka acts are puzzling, the various characters are well framed in this dual society, where women take an important role in the novel, perhaps an ad, or rather a warning to the traditional distrust of female intelligence.

Ka is a poet. Poetry, though not literally, is present significantly in the book, like love, and compensates the political scenes that otherwise seem quite understandable to Westerners. This is not the struggle between evil and good, but the eternal story of the powerful and the weak. Pamuk was not convicted trivially to insult the Turkish nation, and has earned the enmity of Turkish nationalism more exacerbated. At the same time, is the most beloved author in Turkey and also has numerous followers around the world. It thus appears that the internal contradictions of Turkey are the Ka, and also, plausibly, that of Pamuk.

also in love, as in politics, there is a powerful and weak, a lover and a lover, a giver and a receiver. Pamuk explores the parallels between the characters inside and outside of politics, where the old story tells us that the heart can not be dominated by intention. History repeated a thousand times, it does move us and excited. Unforgettable. During the novel

wonderful things happen and describe improbable situations which may well be true, as the director of the local newspaper, which published the news before it happens (and always end up happening) or theological discussions and conversion to Islam of Ka. The story, narrated by his close friend Orhan, attempts to reconstruct the history of Ka through the poems he wrote during his stay in Kars. Poems which resulted in the breaking of silence Ka writer and seem lost. Orhan travels in the last chapters of the book, Kars, and the reconstruction of events resulting in a final and somewhat surprisingly prescient Turkish society. Near the end of the work, one of the most celebrated events, a character asks Orhan not to write a book about what happened in Kars, because since so far no one will understand. No reader, then, would be able to understand any novel. That is what precisely the greatness of literature, making it possible.

I've been thinking a lot about what I disliked the novel. I could mention the title of the chapters, a bit naive, but once the novel's encounter with respect. I could mention the undeniable merciful treatment ruffians, some terrorists and guerrillas who appear in the action promptly. But I think all the final fits, the beauty of the book comes from these small inconsistencies, which in turn reflect the contradictions of Turkey, of Ka and Pamuk. Cast the first stone who is without them.