Winter is winter, it seems ultra appropriate to read or reread The Vampire, by John William Polidori, doctor of the poet Lord Byron, written on a hallucinating gothic night. One of the vampire’s senses is exploitation. As a blood addict he sustains himself by predating women and workers. That same extremely hostile night, trapped by the cold and the storm, Mary Shelley wrote the most organic and indisputably current novel Frankenstein. This was published in 1818 and The Vampire, in 1819 (Diamela Eltit, writer)
The idea began to hatch when we were playing at the end of the world at the beginning of the millennium, perhaps while listening to The Red Telephone in the Repvbblica room. The translator Elvira Asensi saw an Arthur Lee show in Valencia, almost fresh out of prison and accompanied by a Swedish band. Fundamentals frontman Love had returned to the stage just a month earlier and, perhaps excited by the show, Asensi came to Barney Hoskyns’ book, Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or, published two months before the musician regained his freedom after settle a fight with a neighbor with a bullet in the air.
In 2022, almost twenty years later —and at the end of the world—, the translator was putting the finishing touches on Hotel California —another Hoskyns book—, when she proposed Contra the story of Love and its main composer. She tells it in the introduction to Arthur Lee: splendor and decadence of Love, the volume that recreates the creative miscegenation and the resounding fall of a group that recorded important albums like Forever Changes.
Sabotaged by a “slightly agoraphobic” frontman who is difficult to deal with, the book recounts—in the manner of choral biographies—Love’s frustrated greatness and Lee’s belated recognition. Member of the group of great musicians “anguished, lonely and disconcerting”, such as Captain Beefheart and Brian Wilson -according to the founder of the Elektra label-; his story is also the aftermath of the Summer of Love in Los Angeles, between problematic heroin use, crimes and ego fights, similar to the mixture of electricity and warmth of the strings and winds that brought the sound of that legendary album to the height of the classics A reading to warm up with Forever changes in the background. (Alejandro Jofré, editor of Paniko.cl)
I recommend White Earthquake, the first book by Natacha Oyarzún (Alchemy, 2022). “Winter always had a crack through which to speak to us”, will say the narrator of one of the ten stories that make up this book. And although the winter of Tierra del Fuego speaks in our ears all the time, the warmth of a prose that will envelop us in the middle of the storm will also slip through the crack. (Alejandra Costamagna, writer)
Regardless of the barometers, even regardless of the thermostat that everyone has inside, I find it hard to believe that there is a better book than Hunger (Anagram, 2022), by John Fante, to wait for this winter. The volume brings together 18 exceptional stories, mostly from youth, written between 1932 and 1959, rescued by the writer’s biographer, Stephen Cooper, from the archives that remained after his death in 1983, when the writer was already blind and had been amputated. legs because of diabetes. The themes touched on by these remarkable writings -several of which were sketches that he later developed in his novels- are typical of all proletarian Italian-American artists: family, childhood, friends, bars, women, failure , poverty, tough guys and shady guys. While it is difficult not to recognize Fante’s talent for provocation, insult and sarcasm, one must also concede that few authors handled lyricism and emotion with as much modesty as he did or combined humor with tenderness with such mastery. He was a staunchly literary novelist who drew on Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Mencken, and Knut Hamsum, among others. Porca miseria: success came to him after his death, largely after Bukowski canonized him. Although the translation into the worst Spanish in Spain is often lamentable, it is a great book that, hot or cold, this year you should not miss. (Héctor Soto, columnist La Tercera)
I think winter could be perfect for going to live in a huge book with many worlds inside it, like the prodigious Mrs. Potter is not exactly Santa Claus by the Spanish writer Laura Fernández. A world, moreover, where it does not stop snowing, where there are ghosts that are rented to haunt houses, where a submerged city is built and so many, many more wonders. And since we are dealing with snow and ice, I would like to recommend other great books: Winter Postcards (by Ann Beattie), Melvill (by Rodrigo Fresán) and Los Cuentos (by Mavis Gallant) in which one of my favorite stories is found. : The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street. More ice, more wonder, more worlds in a world. Because winter can also be perfect for going to live in a great collection of stories gathered together: like the ones just mentioned by Gallant, those by Joy Williams or Amy Hempel, to name a few. (María José Navia, writer and academic Literature UC)
Perhaps the best novel—a sort of nouvelle—about a not-so-simple and intense male mortal is A Love Poem. It is ideal for reading during the short time that the sun enters and warms something. Because when the sun disappears, these poems hit you with an unexpected combo, when the real cold and devastation arrive. This book by the sometimes irascible and other times controversial and complicated, and on many occasions feared and hated, but also unrepeatable and necessary cultural agitator that Matías Rivas is makes many things clear, starting with being someone who burns and burns everywhere. A book that reads like short stories or the draft of a novel that transforms the apartments, the beds and their pillows, the gardens-next-door, the dirty dishes into a new capital geography. Here love is not pink and desire is rather dark. Rivas has read all the toxic men and has purified them until becoming one of the composers of emo-guilt-guitar songs. His narrator is a compulsive mental cheater, guilt and fear transform him into a hero as few narrators have managed to put together. Here the couple or couples save or drown. It makes it clear that a poetics can be made without being candid or tender. On the contrary: he enjoys showing us what is not narrated about relationships, even those that do not materialize. Here there is love but also hate, anger and desire, an exhibition of the real, not the one that is content to show what is appropriate, but what is not processed. They are poems for people who do not read poems, because their condensed poems, geckos for this era, seem like pieces of ice sharpened by the polar wave that attacks us, where, for a while, one burns with the pages of A love poem. (Alberto Fuguet, writer)
I highly recommend Nicolas Poblete’s latest novel, Suction (Own Room). It is a disturbing novel about a mother’s mourning for her daughter, far from elegiac and mournful prose. What Nicolás Poblete concocts in this book is the possibility of overcoming loss through production and sale, consumption and accumulation. It is the (capitalist) conversion of mourning that Sarai narrates to the deceased Ingrid, because it is precisely her death that triggers the bizarre transformation of her discreet animita into a gigantic, grotesque monument (“mall”) of stuffed animals. , dolls and various odds and ends: Ingrid (“beautiful girl”, “angel of the road”) is becoming an object of popular adoration, an idolized figure and perhaps a miracle worker for some urban pilgrims who visit her loaded with requests.
In these pages, Poblete extends that aseptic and skeptical prose, at times disillusioned, that characterizes his work, as dazzling as it is prolific, so incisive in its approach to the most complex issues of our times. (Lina Meruane, writer)
It is an exceptional and overwhelming novel. Published in 1988, it is a monologue, whose protagonist, Kate, describes her lonely present in an apocalyptic world. She lives in her beach house with an atlas and a biography of Brahms. She was an artist, she lost her husband and son. Later, she sought refuge in museums to spend the winters. She was at the Louvre, the National Gallery and the Metropolitan, where she set fire to famous works to save herself from the cold.
Markson created in this book a unique voice, capable of hypnotizing the reader. It is a voice that flows in fragments that are linked without the need for a logical thread. It tells of the disappearance of reality swallowed up by devastation and pain. He does it curiously with irony, despite the terminal landscape. He crosses from memory to paranoid and cultural reflection. He seduces by his originality to describe the amazing landscapes that inhabit a crazy mind affected by fear. (Matías Rivas, poet, columnist for La Tercera)
A good book to stop suffering from frozen feet is Nowhere to go (Black Box), by the Lithuanian writer and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. It is a migration diary, notes that he was taking between 1944 and 1949, hostile years in which he wandered through countries like Austria, Switzerland or Germany after fleeing his country for participating in anti-Nazi activities. He went through forced labor camps and refugee camps; he slept in filthy barracks and barely ate. “From Webern onwards, snow and cold (…). In Giessen, snow… We left Kassel with light clothes for the hot weather. Now we’re freezing like dogs. We jump, we try to warm ourselves, but nothing helps, ”he wrote in 1947, two years before arriving in New York. Although the reader’s hands may have frozen hands while leafing through the book, it is impossible for them not to feel lucky in their comfortable life: if Mekas managed to find poetry in the most absolute cold and adversity, there is no other option than to gather courage and stop suffering for the smallness of having frozen feet. (Evelyn Erlij, editor Palabra Pública magazine)
To get through these cold and rainy times that have plagued the southern regions, I recommend this book, Atacama ghost. A book that goes through the history of the desert. From the entry of Diego de Almagro, through the nitrate mines, social revolutions, anthropology and archaeology. A book that gives an overview -very entertaining- of how to understand the history of Chile through the desert. Since it’s cold, what better than the desert? (Sergio Parra, Heavy Metals bookseller)
2023-07-01 00:55:25
#Pages #stove #books #cold #Tercera
