Three years before the popular Cabezas cortadas , Pablo Gutiérrez surprised us with Los libros repentes , a book that has gone unnoticed in a somewhat unfair way.
And that doesn't seem right to us.
If we at Postposmo were junkies of the new releases tables, hungry skimmers of the Thursday edition of Cultura/s , devotees of the Friday edition of Cultural , obsessive clippers of Babelias on Saturdays, the kind who underline every italic written by Manuel Rodríguez Rivero , those cockroaches waiting for ten o'clock for their good Sunday Página 2 live, no podcast or anything, commenting on it on Twitter, strolling on a good Monday through bookstores where the bookseller tells us about yesterday's Página 2, tells us about the latest publishing hit , we, stinking members of a brotherhood in perpetual procession towards La Casa Encendida, the Casa de América, the CCCB, rodents of blogs, magazines and presentations where nobody asks anything, only us, the impertinent lice whom nothing satisfies anymore, memorizers of top fiction, non-fiction, and poetry bestsellers, memorizers of this week's best-selling children's book, incapable of waiting for a translation Having read Houellebecq 's latest , and knowing for months that Jonathan Franzen 's new book , about to land on the Iberian Peninsula, isn't all that great (or so they say), if we here at the blog were, well, literature junkies (which we are, in almost everything we've said, but moderate junkies), we could wrap up this thing we're about to spout with a bit more substance and a bit less shamelessness : Pablo Gutiérrez 's * Los libros repente * (2015) is one of the best books published in recent years. BOOM!
Reading is cool! The reading is cool!, The Sudden Books seems to tell us if we limit ourselves to summarizing its synopsis, which rather seems to have been taken from the discarded ideas box of interns from the Department of Development to the reading of the Minister of Culture on duty. Namely: an unfortunate old woman finds a box full of classic jewels of Spanish letters (hence the title) whose reading manages to reformulate (or rather coin) concepts such as social justice, critical thinking or the very nature of life. Remedios aka Reme wakes up and realizes that life, far from being the stingy mess that has been beating her in the kidneys for 70 years, is actually (was) a freshly painted promenade, a shop window which turned out not to be closed.
rowing revolution
Things explode when, having just devoured Clarín, Pérez de Ayala, Ortega, and company, the old woman refuses to comply with the new municipal ordinance prohibiting hanging laundry out of windows. The rebellion of the houses.
Would the old woman's life have been less of a bitch if she had discovered reading earlier? Possible but unlikely.
Would the old woman have been less bitchy with life if she had discovered reading? That's where we go.
If for Jep Gambardella in The Great Beauty the fragments of beauty in life were a blue sea on the ceiling of his room, a pack of flamingos in the early morning or a girl who walks and laughs under the shelter of the nuns and the orange trees, for Reme, a blessed newborn septuagenarian, living has become synonymous with being able to hang her clothes on the clothesline because that is what her holy slit has dictated.
Above all the good things about Pablo Gutiérrez's novel, one must highlight the Huelva-born writer's wit in choosing and arranging words (which is essentially his style, his voice). Pablo Gutiérrez certainly has a voice, though it would have been better if the novel had been longer: 264 pages that seem too few, given that the story fizzles out just as it's about to get going . The old woman is the central figure around whom a series of characters unfold, whom we get to know almost one per chapter: the drug-addicted and irresponsible daughter, the kid straight out of a reality show like Big Brother and addicted to World of Warcraft , the hippie activist , the ambitious councilman.
Digressions aside, the action in the present tense (that of the clotheslines overflowing with clothes (neighbors indoctrinated by an involuntary local Reme pseudo Ché Guevara through) and the demonstrations, the riot police and the headlines) barely takes place in a few days that are elongated thanks to the intelligent use of the times that the author gives us: each new addition of a character serves to look back, explain where he comes from, where he is going and contrast his principles and values with those of the simple, endearing and old reconverted into "soviet-Reme".
It's not a novel about the economic crisis, but rather a precise snapshot of a time and a society that, once the economic hardships were overcome, began to seem somewhat distant. Above all, it's the portrait of a simple soul, a soul without extraordinary ambitions that only wanted to be happy, content with the little life offered, and that was confronted head-on with the worst that ignorance, cruelty, and class conflict had to offer. We can contrast the personalities of the characters who appear, purely contemporary and in tune with their time, with Reme's internal and external confinement to arrive at the certainty that (almost) all of us have gone mad.
Hurricane Rowe
La Reme pre-sudden books could not be more simple, she wanted nothing, she asked for nothing. Each one has or has had their particular Sisyphus stone in life, Reme's being an ardent youthful sexual desire that was hurtfully extinguished with the flames of the few rednecks who were able to touch it and, immediately afterwards, announce it in the town square to the whore scream. Its simplicity, which could be confused with happiness and conformism, lies in the frustration of seeing a life that has passed by without anything remarkable to tell.
As Javier Marías would say , Reme realizes with her sudden bursts of reading that it serves a function of recognition , turning the pages into a hall of mirrors in which we see ourselves and assimilate and compare what happens to us. We are not alone. The old woman's problem is that, like Emma Bovary, she married young and unhappily, her husband died, and the rest was only sorrow, drug-addicted children who left home early (in both senses of the word), and a happiness that came too late.
the horse killed him
Thanks to Pío Baroja , for example, Reme discovers that “it had always been like this from the beginning. Back then, wine from a wineskin and Rute brandy were enough, cocaine wasn’t even the dentist’s anesthetic, heroin was Medea or Electra, but in the early hours of those cafes in 1902, the same things happened, the same shenanigans, the same women lost in the dark hearts of men who don’t sleep at home.” And she continues:
“It is not the portion, it is not the product synthesized in any Dutch laboratory; it is the desire and it is the place where you live, the rabbit hutch, the neighborhood of the executed rabbits, the smear on the slabs, the desire to fly through the air with an explosion or with angelic wings, nobody can avoid it, no prophylaxis, no campaign of prevention, comprehensive observatory of.”
Gutiérrez also talks to us about how ugly it was to take drugs in the eighties, with so many rubber bands, syringes and half-open eyelids, as well as the hygienic, aesthetic and energetic twist that pills brought in the nineties. He tells us both about the intricacies of a webcam show show and about the magnetized capturing nature that religion acquires when faith is instrumentalized as the only handle, a free alibi, of a people with hunger, cold and hardship. Each character serves as an excuse to portray what the author most seems to call the attention of a large portion of society (or the one he has chosen to tell us about, that is): the councilman and his sexual games with his wife, the hypocrisy of the flower-eating blogger activist (and his girlfriend, just as pretentious and disgusting) concerned only with taking center stage in the rebellion, the gossip of the local administration or the social housing policy of the rabbit hole, endearing Macondo where this story takes place.
the rabbit hutch
Ah, the rabbit warren. In the fictional town of Alcotán, where the post-war period has been synonymous with real estate boom, we can almost smell the cement and dust, and we can almost see the arrival of the gypsy who's coming to show these miserable poor devils the ropes. Like in the favelas of City of God , the shacks morph into brick blocks, the dirt paths into highways, the hay carts into exhaust pipes, the lower class into the downtrodden.
In the heartbreaking first chapter, the story of newly married Reme is explained ("they moved in with two shirts and two dresses. The bed, the furniture, even the plates and glasses: everything came from a parish auction") and then tells us cynically and crudeness the business vision of the thorny and profitable matter of raising, in the middle of a vacant lot adjoining the town, a massive settlement of genuine starvation:
“You have to open the prisons, they said to each other, and marry all those prisoners with all those painful women, give them a job, a home where they can love their children and forget their resentment (…) they are mean people, illiterate and children of illiterate , and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the same, country people recently arrived in the city but not day laborers with the habit of making an effort, but thieves, scavengers and lazy gypsies (...) they will be the first of their lineage to live in a brick house, with water to drink and roofs that do not fall, their contact repels us because they have moved away from the human condition but it is our duty to return them to the species”.
We don't say Macondo lightly. We say Macondo because fate befalls all the characters in this story; parasitic lives in which a new day has long since ceased to be a new hope; lives left only with the umbrella of resignation, whether sharing groans in the courtyard, doing drugs (injected, snorted, or played on a console), having sex, drinking…the same old melody. Life, seen through the eyes of Pablo Gutiérrez in *Los libros repentes* (Sudden Books), is bleak and frightening. What would have become of Lola in * La familia de Pascual Duarte* (The Family of Pascual Duarte) if she had survived her husband's murderous madness? Here's an example.
Pablo Gutiérrez, The Sudden Books
Six Barral, Barcelona 2015
264 pages | 18 euros