Although often reissued since JB's Workshops of Ediciones recovered it in 1974, it was not easy to get in the peninsular bookstores the great book by Agustín Espinosa, Crime , published in 1934 in the Editions of the Gazette of Art with extraordinary cover by Oscar Dominguez. For a few years, who knows more about Espinosa, José Miguel Pérez Corrales, has been gathering his writings in volumes that can only be obtained on the web and make available to the reader the fascinating work of the Canarian author, where there are jewels like his Lancelot 28º -7º , beautiful comprehensive guide of an Atlantic island.

The edition that approaches us now Crime has taken care of Alexis Ravelo, who has put a long prologue that does not settle for giving keys to reading the book, but that brings us closer to the strange, radical figure, with an unsettling end of Agustín Espinoa . This belonged, almost with a captain's bracelet, to the Canarian group, of surrealist impregnation that was so important for our vanguard to fly higher thanks to the Art Gazette -organizer of the Second International Exhibition of Surrealism-, but also to La Rosa magazine de los Vientos and the books of poems by Pedro García Cabrera or Emeterio Gutiérrez Albelo.

I do not know if it makes the case to enter into the discussion of whether e Crime is a novel or not - if it were, it would be our inaugural surrealist novel and the apex of the genre , parallel to the cusp in poetry that would be Poet in New York of Lorca -. Alfonso Armas defended that it was a novel, in fact, with plausible ingenuity he considered it "a police novel written backwards". The opinion of Pérez Corrales seems more convincing: «The difficulty of typecasting makes it preferable to describe the work simply as a surrealist text». On the other hand Benigno León considers it a set of prose poems since the elements that unite the book do not subordinate some parts to others. Indeed, Crime can perfectly dispense with the illusory medal of being our quintessential surrealist novel or it can be classified as a "novel made of prose poems." Gender consideration, in this case, would have little effect on the impetuous cascade of scenes that are spun here in 11 short prints - divided following the cycle of the seasons - advanced by a preamble and concluded with an epilogue and which, at the time of their appearance caused the scandal and were considered dangerous pornography.

The author, in order to calm the persecution suffered during the war, had to justify its composition a little less than calling it "a sin of youth" and hiding as much as it retained. Espinosa died soon, with 42 years, in 1939, leaving a brief, tense, sustained and bold radical work.

At the beginning of the book we find a masochistic narrator who ends up committing a crime - which will go through suicide. The victim is his beautiful young wife who liked to humiliate him with eschatologies and masturbate before him kissing the portrait of a boy with a soft dark mustache. What comes next is a succession of hallucinated scenes, of imposing unreality, with an abundance of rugged and violent moments and memorable images: "A truncated head of a brunette woman, who looked at me with pleading eyes from a corner of the balcony." What the head has to say continues to humiliate the unveiled voice of the speaker, placing the text on the side of the atonement: «I can tell you that I hate you, my poor old man mocked, my great cuckold macilent. You will never touch my breasts, today touched by the hands of angels ... ». Then other scenes are linked, "an uncontrolled dream" starring a hat, a murderer invaded by tenderness, an Augustine turned horse that is left in inheritance to a veterinarian . The mere description of each stamp impoverishes the visual power of Espinosa's prose, with an unusual tremor and freedom in our narrative - as background the books of the Flower of Californía by José María Hinojosa, Yo, inspector of sewers of Giménez can hardly be cited Caballero and the extraordinary and very rare imbalance of Julio Satan.

Alexis Ravelo does well to advance the wonderful Ode to María Ana to his Crime edition . First Prize of underarms of 1930, in which Espinosa is shown as a sewer of dreams and collector of lilies . The editor points out, and he is right, that the atmosphere of the poem is festive and vital, which contrasts sharply with the essential pessimism of Crime . Where I do not know if it is so right it is in the prediction that the reading of Crime , today, will frighten readers and get, as in 1934, "that legions of fathers and mothers run to stone Espinosa with their anger always justified and always oblivious to the fact that obscenity is never in what is seen but in the eye that looks. Today there are more effective tools than in 1934 to deactivate the dynamite of a text: it is enough not to pay attention to it.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • culture
  • literature

Literature38 tupamaras stars: the biggest escape from a women's prison in history

The Paper SphereNew Cioran texts: "I have a negative courage, a courage directed against myself"

The Paper Sphere'Cruising ': go out, take a walk, see if something comes up