It is a chick to say today of any narrator that he is a "cult author" because almost everyone is: they have no choice but to be. It would be said that there are only two divisions, the "recognized authors" and the "cult authors." The group of the latter has grown so much that they run the risk of becoming something like "the sect of the vile" that appears in the Comedy of Dante, composed of innumerable beings who are not allowed to enter the depths of hell neither to peek into purgatory nor go to heaven, but they are destined to remain in a circle in which no one stands or looks at them . Luckily, there are always those who stop to look at them, to render justice, to try to make current what seemed doomed to be swallowed by oblivion - which anyway does not guarantee that this will not be their inevitable fate, although at less delay her a little more.

It happens for example with José Avello, an extraordinary narrator who for some reason is part of the club of "cult authors" , barely recognized outside that club, although there is nothing in his work that makes him an extravagant, or difficult author, Neither dark nor radical. He limited himself to writing two novels, both excellent, both published by important publishers with national distribution and notable visibility: the first, Beti García's subversion, was a finalist of the Nadal Prize in 1983 (that year he won a novel about Vikings) and published by Destination; the second, Billiards players, was a finalist for the Andalusia prize and was published by Alfaguara in 2001; That year he was a finalist of the National Prize. Being a finalist Juan Avello seems to be his destiny. He barely made a literary life, he was a professor of Sociology at the Complutense University.

The mere fact that 17 years separated his first novel from the second one already indicates the artisan's pulse with which Avello made his meticulously constructed narratives, populated by dozens of characters who unfold with ease and efficiency by the tapestries he is spinning. In Billiard Players, Avello makes a compelling portrait of his own generation - the author was born in 1943, died in 2015 -, which reached the reins of power just after Franco's death. It is not an adjustment of accounts but rather an x-ray that explicitly explains where we came from: the plundering that is portrayed there of those defeated in the war by the victors , and how money and frivolity dance the dance of corruption, draw a Dark panorama through a few childhood friends who are often left to play pool games. Who has best valued and defined the novel has been Santos Sanz Villanueva, so let's quote: "the protagonists go from a youth gauchism, with militancy in the PC included, to the comfort of social democracy based on power and from there to skepticism, the foolishness, delinquency.Finally , failure marks the course of these lordly, shameless, criminal lives.In this sense, Avello offers an inflexible report of the Transition.A urban scam, medullary in the novel plot, exemplifies its bleak current consequence , the empire of corruption.This main line of Billiards players is linked with another one that ends up providing its full meaning.The managements to turn a crockery factory into a select urbanization have their own history, dating back to the tremendous days of the Franco uprising. Actually, it points much further: how the moral debasement caused by the war plans in the ac tuality ».

As you can see, Avello's novel has not even lost relevance - but in the event that he lost it, he would not care, his excellence will not be grieved by that loss because, like any well-mounted narrative, he lives independently of his relationship with the reality in which lead out. The same can be said of Beti García's subversion, which I remember reading fascinated in my adolescence, and that I have read again without the fascination deteriorating. It is a novel so full of characters and plots that it is difficult to reduce it to synopsis. It is also a text against oblivion, an attempt to give a voice to those who lost it or could never have it. It is a family novel - and also historical, because as Curzio Malaparte said the novels that occur in the present are also historical - in which the dramatic story of a woman who goes from confinement to confinement, losing all battles, but being finally restored by who "does have memory". The title Beti participated in a commune in 34, had to hide in the mountains, gave birth to a son, returned to the city in the middle of the war, protected himself in a basement where he was forgotten while his son hid his identity in other parents. The final pages of the novel are moving, splendid: they were written by a true teacher.

The TREA publishing house has reissued both novels. It is an excellent opportunity for José Avello to harvest new readers. I think there is no other narrator of the last decades of our narrative that deserves it more than him.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • literature
  • books
  • culture

The Paper SphereAriana Harwicz: the problem of evil

The Paper Sphere Tom Tryon, the threat of a child

The Paper Sphere Books in the August Sun