Cinema in 2020: the best international films
Cinema in 2020: the 20 best Spanish films
The book sector has been the cultural field that has best weathered the crisis caused by the pandemic, with a decrease in sales of around 10% and with many very good news.
These are the
best literature books
written in Spanish during this 2020 so close to fiction, ordered alphabetically by the author's last name.
'Save the fire', by Guillermo Arriaga
Alfaguara
Two Mexicans taken to the extreme intersect in a crazy and impossible love: the refined world of a choreographer and the gagged impetus of a convict.
And among them, a society unable to contain the fury of the underprivileged, the hunger for hope.
A novel with a runaway rhythm like the avalanche of blood, drugs and frenzy of characters who bet everything on a weak future but which they need to cling to.
"The father hung his daughter's wedding dress in the closet, still bloody and with two bullet holes."
And so.
'Houses and tombs', Bernardo Atxaga
Alfaguara
The (partial) return to Obaba is the farewell to the novel of the National Prize for Letters.
"The writer must be among the people, in the market," says the Asteasu writer, and that shows in his books.
In this one, a child returns speechless from a boarding school in France, some young men do military service in El Pardo, strikes begin, the end of Francoism, revenge, echoes of ETA ... Everything is changing in Ugarte, a town with a flavor of grass, the smell of rain and children playing until dusk on the fronton.
"A place on the border between the old and the new universe, unlike Obaba, who belonged entirely to the first. Television has already entered Ugarte", comments the author of 'Obabakoak'.
And that broke a world that refuses to die.
Eva Baltasar.
'Boulder', by Eva Baltasar
Random House
A couple of women, educated and more or less prosperous, in the corner of youth.
One of them wants to be a mother.
Not the other one, but she gets carried away.
When the son arrives, the less enthusiastic one enters a slide toward self-destruction.
Is she a villain, is she a victim, or is she really a character fighting for her way of life?
'Life of Guastavino and Guastavino', by Andrés Barba
Anagram
She looks like one of those minimalist French novels looking for a seemingly expansive and extravagant character but deep down inaccessible.
However, the saga of Berlanguian Valencian architects from New York has something that can only be Spanish.
"How Valencian", writes Barba at one point in his story.
'Tales', by Carlos Castán
Foam Pages
Carlos Castán's work was, until now, scattered in a handful of hard-to-find books, almost objects of worship, so it is an excellent moment to discover or recover a writer of those who know that living is risking having a life well told.
Until now, Carlos Castán's stories have been collected in three volumes:
Cold to live
,
Museum of loneliness
and
Solo de lo perdi
.
I don't think anyone is sure what a perfect story is, perhaps the one that moves us and adds astonishment.
Well, Castán's stories, if we stick to that elementary test, are dazzling.
In them there is no evidence, but rather a very personal way of telling and an intelligent look at those matters that matter to him: reflection on loneliness, the fragility of what surrounds us, the claws and scars of love, the fight against intimate ghosts , against the guilt and the tonnage of memory.
Reading Carlos Castán dispenses a tremor of emotion and thought.
What more can you ask of a book.
To a writer who chose to write when he really preferred to be quiet.
'Without the dead', by Alicia Giménez Bartlet
Destination
It occurred to Alicia Giménez Bartlett to write her memoirs, but her editor made her face skeptical.
So the idea became an autobiography of Petra Delicado, Giménez Bartlett's police heroine, from her middle-class childhood under Franco to her slow release in the 1970s.
Valeria Luiselli.
'False papers', by Valeria Luiselli
Sixth floor
The first texts of Luiselli (written in Spanish before it was switched to English and now collected) are a kind of notebooks of a stroller through the impassable Mexico City, The author, an eternally exiled Mexican, finds the exact proportion of strangeness and closeness.
'Encargo', by Berta Marsé
Anagram
Desi and Jesi, two friends who are actually rivals, in the style of Lenú and Lila in Elena Ferrante's novels, cross paths and separate once after another throughout life until they reach an outcome in which revenge and compassion are confused.
'Journey to the South', by Juan Marsé
Lumen
The lost book of the giant of 20th century Spanish literature is an almost journalistic travel notebook through Andalusia in 1962, at the time when Marsé is about to stop being a boy for everything in a jewelry workshop and become a writer full time.
Just to meet the character who would end up being the Pijoaparte from 'Last Afternoon with Teresa', this chronicle of a country without fastening is worth it, where humor tries to alleviate the uneasiness of tavern drinkers and teenagers who are fascinated by the marines of Rota .
Prints of the first tourists, "cobbler workshops below street level", patriotic demonstrations of Falangists with black glasses, the concierge of the Ronda bullring ... The book, with excellent photographs by Albert Ripoll Guspi, It also tells the adventures of a young Marsé in Paris, the uncertainties of the preparations for the trip and the adventures of this book through the archives of the publishing house Ruedo Ibérico until it was rescued (expert and meticulous work by Andreu Jaume).
It seems incredible that everything happened the day before yesterday.
'One hundred nights', by Luisgé Martín
Anagram
Obscene, thoughtful and funny, the winner of the last Anagrama Prize begins as the representation of a scientific investigation on contemporary sexuality and later becomes an almost mysterious plot.
There is no idealism in its pages but that does not mean that there is no nobility.
'Do not go meekly into that quiet night' by Ricardo Martínez Salmón
Seix Barral
The issue of problematic male parenting has become one of the defining issues of our time.
Martínez Salmón takes it to the extreme in this confessional account of a sick, depressed and abandoned father.
'So that you come back today' by Eduardo Mendicutti
Tusquets
Mendicutti always says that his novels are divided into two: the experimental with verb and extravagant characters and the realistic and serene.
So that you come back today belongs to the second group and has as a great incentive the well-known ease of its author to attend to the loneliness and longing of the human being.
Sara Mesa.
'Un amor', by Sara Mesa
Anagram
Beyond the title, the word love does not appear in the 186 pages of the novel.
A story that has claustrophobia in its environment and inside.
The environment is a rural and closed space, La Escapada;
the inside is the evolution of the protagonist, Nat, a translator who isolates herself to work in a ramshackle country house where something is announced, something that could be a vital storm, and without being devastating, it fosters a change that goes from outside to inside.
Nat lives a disturbing experience of sexual desire and living with a social group loaded with insurmountable rules.
A story of self-exploration, of self-knowledge, of uneasiness, of disappointments, of sex as a vested interest or an exchange of favors, which is not always a denaturing of sex, but an option.
It is also a story where the horror of gossip, gossip, rumors weighs heavily.
This novel by Sara Mesa is sustained by the very tension it generates, by the characters who are sometimes stalked and stalking beings.
Another strong point is the relationship with the group, including group dynamics, with its benefits and perversions.
Who has not had the experience of ever feeling alien, strange, even isolated, in the midst of a group of people with whom, in one way or another, he lives.
Well, that happens in this novel,
Un amor
.
'Empty houses', by Brenda Navarro
Sixth floor
The first novel of the Mexican Brenda Navarro (1982) is convulsed: of writing, of plot, of damage.
Motherhood is the touchstone of this narrative adventure in which two women have the same wound: the son.
One of her is robbed in a park, the other is the product of a robbery.
What disappears with young Daniel (the boy who will be renamed Leonel later) is not the creature, but life itself.
And from there, the conflict grows and makes blood.
The vulnerability, the assimilation of an impossible pain, the challenge of the irremediable, the memory and the punishment also of hope.
The interior monologues pierce the reading until it becomes a blind combat.
Empty Houses
is a literary artifact where the devastation and the woman's body reach the combustion of a political story driven between the guilt, care and love of two beings whose prodigy is the same life that they lose and take away.
And, in the middle, a child.
'Las voladoras', by Mónica Ojeda
Foam Pages
The stories of the Ecuadorian writer are explorations in the wild: in the textures of pain, in the mystery of animal life, in the vertigo of earthquakes ... Ojeda also released this year the poetry book
Historia de la leche.
'Simón', by Miqui Otero
Blackie Books
The genre of the novel of initiation in a more or less canalized Barcelona has a long tradition that peaks in
Simón
.
The story that Otero tells is also a Barojian adventure, a love song for books and a story of social classes.
'Like dust in the wind', by Leonardo Padura
Tusquets
Clara, Elisa, Bernardo, Darío, Irving, Horacio ... They are all characters united by a cataclysm: some left Cuba and began a new life wherever they fell.
And how could they.
Padura has had it clear: to stay and live in the house that his grandfather built, but not so thousands and thousands of compatriots who used their imagination to get away from misery and discontent.
If you already dealt with exile in a memorable book, in 'La novela de mi mi vida' (on the sad story of the poet Jose María Heredia), write here your great pending account, the dilemma between those who had to choose between misfortune and hopelessness.
Longing for Cuba, for the language, for one's own roots ... The past: always there.
The disappointment of a revolution, the constant suspicion, the rumors, the Special Periods, Miami, the lost affections.
All on hold, all untied.
'Line of fire', by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Alfaguara
Pérez-Reverte delivered this year the great novel about the Civil War that we all sensed and hoped was due to himself.
Line of fire
is a collage of intimate and cross stories in the middle of the Battle of the Ebro that emphasizes the brotherhood of the enemies in the misery of combat.
That episode, moreover, was decisive in the outcome of the contest.
20,000 people died.
The journalist and academic delves into the daily fears, hopes and fears of unscrupulous commanders, the doubts of the soldiers, the misfortune of 17-year-old boys (the Fifth of the Bottle) who went to the front with shorts.
That closeness, that transparency of the soul is the main achievement of this book about that fratricidal confrontation, the bloodiest of all.
We attend the battle, as if we were in front of a movie theater screen.
"It's the bad thing about these wars. That you hear the enemy calling his mother in the same language as you."
'You will settle down', by Ignacio Peyró
Asteroid Books
Spanish literature is supposed to be rusty in the newspaper genre, but a couple of cult books drop every year.
And not all of them are by Andrés Trapiello.
The texts included here portray Peyró's journey from his twenties to his early thirties as a conservative journalist, but not so much.
Terminal station: the Palacio de la Moncloa.
Alexis Ravelo.
'A guy with a bag on his head', by Alexis Ravelo
Siruela
Ravelo turns the mold of his criminal novels upside down: the narrative here becomes the interior monologue of a corrupt and rather detestable councilor whom the reader will end up seeing with compassionate eyes.
A
crematorium
for this moment.
'Blood of wolves', by Alberto Rojas
Editions B
"Archie, my friend, I have stolen, assaulted, threatened, extorted, falsified my identity many times, beaten up, murdered rivals and ransacked the homes of people who had died in the bombings. I am a real son of a bitch."
This is how Valdivia defines himself, Andrés Valdivia, 23, a 'posh party' who drinks Old Fashioned, smokes Craven A cigarettes, is generous with tips and hides a faca and a Walter PPK in his suit.
Valdivia is a handsome guy, his hair slicked back with glitter who, in the first months of the end of the Civil War, tries to get ahead among the rubble of a desolate Madrid full of Nazi and English spies who pour whiskey and champagne at the Cock.
Valdivia will be recruited and will enter a spiral that will take him through a troubled Europe where nobody is what they seem.
Brilliant novelistic debut from this audacious repository.
'Red chalk', by Isaac Rosa
Seix Barral
50 stories by the author of
The Country of Fear
that emphasize his vocation to find atypical approaches to narrate topics as real and close as possible.
Hotel evictions, bill books, WhatsApp groups of parents ...
'El mal de Corcira', by Lorenzo Silva
Destination
For the last 25 years, the novels of Bevilacqua and Chamorro have been the tool with which Lorenzo Silva has portrayed contemporary Spain with the excuse of his criminal investigations.
In
El mal de Corcira
the two civil guards reconstruct the years of terrorism in the Basque Country from their own experience.
'The bad ones', by Camila Sosa Villada
Tusquets
Half story of survival in the first person, half letter to the father in the form of revenge, The scene, which is what matters here, is a park in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, where transvestites go to war every night and where they also find brotherhood and comfort.
'Rewind', by Juan Tallón
Anagram
Juan Tallón's achievement in this novel is to create a kaleidoscope of voices, glances, shudders, and seized lives.
Five Erasmus students live together in an apartment in Lyon.
One Friday, one of many but with the incentive of a party between them, the apartment where they live bursts due to an explosion.
Their neighbors also suffer the violence of the outbreak.
It is a Moroccan family perfectly well off in the neighborhood and in the life of the city.
What happened that night is told by some of the surviving boys and girls, three years later, rewinding their lives and displaying memories, unclosed wounds and some assimilated scars.
Giving meaning to life, and how we do it, and how to do it, is one of the strengths of a novel that deserves to have its place among the best of the year.
Andrés Trapiello.
'Madrid', by Andrés Trapiello
Destination
In reality, Andrés Trapiello's relationship with the city he arrived in at some point in the 1970s was already scattered by the routines of his diaries,
The Hall of Lost Steps
: the early risers at the Rastro, the errands by Conde de Xiquena, the friends from Calle Ferraz ... In
Madrid
, that old love appears synthesized and made essence.
'Vindictas' (various authors)
Foam Pages
Juan Casamayor and Socorro Venegas asked a handful of Latin American writers to propose texts to them to build a canon of the story in Spanish written by women.
The result is a poignant set of stories about hypocrisy and nonconformity written by authors who unjustly fell out of history.
'1980', by Juan Vila
Anagram
Another novel about children looking for their male father.
The peculiarity is that this time, the father is a stepfather, a seemingly impeccable Barcelona gentleman (we all have our secrets) who insisted on saving the narrator from a fatal childhood.
'Orient-Express', by Mauricio Wiesenthal
Cliff
A travel novel, a book of Histories, a set of impressionist prints ... All that is
Orient-Express
, the novel about the train that stitched together Europe in the 19th century and which became one of the great literary myths of its time and our nostalgia.
'Chilean Poet', by Alejandro Zambra
Anagram
Here's the great novel that fans of Zambra's storybooks have been waiting for years.
The joy of this story lies in the insistence of the appetite to be a poet.
In the making of two teenagers who at some point in their lives are poisoned by poetry.
Two men of different generations, stepfather and stepson, who slowly have the same purpose in life, poetry, and come to it in a very different way, in an expiation of common belonging, of the family as an inherited entity, of ambition like a reckoning.
The
Chilean Poet's
Zambra
is on the path of storytellers who found their first and wildest obsession in the exercise of poetry.
Already from Cervantes and, from there to Faulkner, Nabokov, Kipling, Cortázar, Nadine Gordimer ... And, in another way, James Joyce.
This novel is a reflection on that very thing: enthusiasm, vocation, commitment to poetry.
And, at the same time, the story of a broken family that with difficulty recomposes its family love, where all beings are in some way false.
Where all beings uncork in their own way the euphoria of love, and its consequences.
The narrator who is Alejandro Zambra displays a lesson in poetry, in life, in reality, in dreams and frustrations.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
literature
culture
Madrid
Cuba
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Argentina
Basque Country
Europe
Spain
Cordova
theater
Exclusive interview Bernardo Domínguez: "Malpaso must be judged by his books"
LiteratureFrancisco Brines: "Without tolerance, life has a point of dislike"
Literature Sara Jaramillo: "If I met my father's murderer, I don't know what I would do"
See links of interest
Last News
English translator
TV programming
Quixote
TV Movies
Holidays 2021
Holidays 2020
Topics
Poblense - Olot
Coruxo - Malaga
Loyalty - Alcorcón
Burgos CF - FC Andorra
Barcelona - Real Sociedad