Books: The 30 best Spanish literature books of 2020
Cinema: The 20 best Spanish films of 2020
Cinema The 20 best international films of 2020
2020
, the year of the pandemic, has also been the year in which many readers found the desired time for literature.
The balance of the year thus includes a few
books
, including these novels, chronicles and translated memoirs, included in the selection of
the best of the year
by journalists from the Culture section of EL MUNDO.
'Find me', by André Aciman
Alfaguara
/
The characters in
Call me by your name
, the novel that became a cult film, now reappear as rather disenchanted adults.
In their own way, Elio, Oliver and Samuel seek a zero tie with life.
Until their paths cross again as in a second saving chance.
'The interior ghetto', by Santiago Amigorena
Random House
Survival is supposed to be an obligation that concerns us all.
For the character in
El ghetto interior
(the work of an Argentine but written in French), it is also an ordeal.
The character's Polish family has died, all of it, in the Holocaust.
For his survivor, exiled in Buenos Aires, only anguish and guilt remain.
'History of my loft and other elatos', by Isaak Bábel
Lower case
Perfectionist, picky, admirer of Guy de Maupassant, hunted and shot, lover of precision, of the flash of the brief, these 11 texts are delight.
"He was wearing no hat, all of him with his light, spiky red hair, his cotton bib on one side and the occasional button fastened, but not the correct buttonhole."
As Ricardo San Vicente says in the epilogue, "he manipulates reality to get closer to the essence of things."
These texts, which in another way are connected to his life, appeared in different magazines between 1915 and 1930, he wanted them to be published in a book, but he was arrested and ...
'The days of the Caucasus', by Banine
Siruela
A beautiful novel in the purest and most eternal sense of the word: Banine, daughter of two dynasties of oil magnates in the Caucasus, writes a childhood of cosmopolitan Azeris who are almost like white Russians and who obviously do not know that they are on the eve of the drama of history.
Delusions of cosmopolitan grandeur, German governesses, grandmothers out of a cave ...
'Memory exercises', by Andrea Camilleri
Salamander
Beyond his criminal stories of low crime intensity and high literature, the teacher Camilleri became strong in a genre half biographical half political.
Here, the author's life is written in parallel to the history of the second half of the 20th century in Europe, from the miracle of reconstruction to the years of lead.
The book was dictated, already blind, in 2016, on the verge of 91 years, when nothing, but also everything, matters.
Hence the humor and melancholy of his memories.
Memorable his relationship with the mafia, the 'scare' of Ian McEwan, his family summers being a kid, the spies that his father brought to dinner, his vicissitudes with some bandits, his foray into the cinema with Antonioni and Monica Vitti, the figure The key to a cousin of his father, the curator Carmelo Camilleri (who inspired his curator Montalvano), his relationship with Vázquez Montalbán ... Camilleri gave a lot of himself.
Ted Chiang's 'Exhalation'
Sixth floor
Very briefly, the stories of
Exhalación
have something very modern and, at the same time, something very classic that refers to the stories of Jorge Luis Borges.
Fantastic tales, bent lives, innocent toys that become doors to parallel worlds ... Chiang is a very unprolific author, so we must take advantage of this train.
'Not all men inhabit the world in the same way', by Jean Paul Dubois
DNA
This year's Goncourt Prize seems like an American novel rather than a French one.
If it even turns out that the main stage is Canada, with its endless north to which its characters flee, permanently determined to get away from what they want to get an idea of what they are.
They will end up in jail or worse but they will find some love.
'White', by Bret Easton Ellis
Random House
We knew Bret Easton Ellis for his minimalist horror novels, which were all nerve and no flesh.
It's funny to meet him again after many years, aboard books like
Blanco
, which are divine gossip about memories of a seventies childhood, not very good Richard Gere movies and heavy boyfriends in his crusade against Donald Trump.
'The annual banquet of the brotherhood of gravediggers', by Mathias Enard
Random House
The new novel for the 2017 Goncourt Prize seems designed to rest alongside his other great works,
Zona
y
Brújula
: colossal, ambitious, evocative, almost anachronistic novels ... This time, the journey is not towards the East or towards the Balkans but towards a kind of emptied France, populated by yellow vests and secret admirers of Rabelais.
'A Woman', by Annie Ernaux
Cabaret Voltaire
Annie Ernaux narrates with her minimalist style and full of tension the classic journey that goes from the contempt of a daughter towards her mother to her reconciliation, unfortunately possible when death is imminent.
As in many of her books, that learning is also the reconciliation with her social class of the girl who got ahead.
If
anyone
could portray their mother, only very few would succeed with that tone of reproach, sometimes detachment and other reproach towards the most decisive person in their life.
"I lost the last link with the world I came out of" is the last sentence of the book.
Where did it come from?
From a mist that the book is dissolving.
'Unorthodox', by Deborah Feldman
Lumen
It is hardly necessary to explain the story of the book that inspired the quarantine series: the black sheep of a Hasidic community, his escape to Berlin, the reunion with his mother ... If the viewers of the series are looking for a reason to read, what get used to the idea that the story does not have the emotional intensity of the series but puts the missing information on the screen.
'The lying life of adults', by Elena Ferrante
Lumen
After the Neapolitan trilogy Lenú y Lila, it is the turn of Giovanna, a bourgeois girl with an ugly duckling complex to make sense of her family's black holes.
Gioavanna becomes obsessed with a disgraced aunt and, in her search, she will open all the cracks in her world.
'Septology II.
The other name ', Jon Fosse
By Conatus
We have known Fosse as one of those perennial Nobel Prize candidates and as a caustic but admirable character in
Karl Ove Knausgaard's
My Struggle
.
This long and melodious monologue, told by a lonely alcoholic painter, is the gateway for many Spanish readers into his literature.
His conversion to Catholicism, the anguish of living alone among fjords, of having lost?
to his wife, the obsession of painting at five in the morning, the dark luminosity of some of his paintings, his strange relationship with the only neighbor with whom he relates ... A disturbing book, but also addictive.
Of course, Jon Fosse does not like points very much and often, especially in the first installment of this septology that will be published at the same time throughout Europe.
A Terrible Country, by David Gessen
Gutenberg Galaxy
One of the most sweetly comic books of the year: a Russian boy emigrates to the United States with his family.
His parents are doing well but not much for him, so I know, after the years, he returns to Moscow with the very unsexy motive of taking care of his grandmother and playing ice hockey in the parks.
The world he encounters is violent, corrupt, and sloppy, but little will he do.
'For the good times', by David Keenan
Sixth floor
Some neighborhood brutes (from the Catholic neighborhood) become subcontractors for the IRA sometime in the 1970s. And in part, they are happy like that, shooting and wreaking havoc on the side of
their
good guys.
But in part, they long for a lighter, more cosmopolitan world of pop records, sci-fi comics, and uninhibited women.
'All in vain', by Walter Kempowski
Asteroid Books
All in vain seems a book from another era.
In a house in Prussia, in 1945, at that moment when the Russian Army was already advancing like a locomotive towards Berlin, a German aristocratic widow, not enough Nazis for her neighbors, survives poverty and intrigues with her son.
'Stories', by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Anagram
Not only the Duke of Palma de Montechiaro and Prince of Lampedusa wrote
El Gatopardo
.
Around the novel there were sketches, pages that served as support, digression or laboratory and that now are made known.
Thus, some childhood memories, when in 1900 she was three and a half years old: "My mother was combing her hair, helped by the maid, and I don't know what she was doing, sitting on the floor in the center of the room."
These are the quiet moments before the family finds out that King Humberto has been assassinated.
Other evocations are also included in this volume, as well as the Christmas story
Joy and the Law
and, above all, the story
The Mermaid
, which Marguerite Yourcenar liked so much.
Introductions, handwritten texts and drawings by the writer complement this edition.
'Souls and bodies', by David Lodge
Impediment
London, 1950s: a congregation of Catholic university students gather around a charismatic priest.
They are diligent, celibate and rigorous, they fall in love, they commit and perhaps have a few moments of happiness.
However, they are unaware that the years of sexual liberation await them, which will shatter their certainties, their loyalties and their idealisms.
'Complete Stories' and 'Anagrams', by Lorrie Moore
Seix Barral and Eternal Cadence
Two titles have coincided this year from the New York writer.
The 1,000 pages of fiction are united by the density of their environments and by an almost secret humor that brings it closer to the classic authors of American stories.
Read together they are a history of American literature and human relationships for the past 30 years.
Anagrams
, her first novel that is now being rescued, shows the emptiness and the search of a young woman who at 33 years of age perceives such a common uneasiness in that border age.
Nightclubs, aerobics classes, relationships that do not know if they have begun or already ended, trips that can be escaped ... Confusion.
'Sun of Blood', by Jo Nesbø
Reservoir
A different book in the Norwegian writer's work: in part it retains the
thriller
air
that readers of Harry Hole expect (its protagonist is a hitman defeated by life), but it puts the psychological emphasis and on the mystique of the almost polar landscape that Nesbø chose as the setting.
'I choose Elena', by Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Alpha Decay
Another testimony book.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley was an Australian gymnast who was preparing to participate in the Olympic Games, when she suffered a rape that forever shattered her physique, her spirits and her sports career.
The story of those events, extremely crude, has a sense of personal redemption.
'Bloody January', by Alan Parks
Tusquets
Glasgow, 1973. Just by naming the setting and the time of
Bloody January,
the great attraction of the very dysfunctional agent McCoy's first adventure is explained.
The crime, this time, is a cross between macho violence, the birth of the heroin culture and religious sectarianism in the main city of Scotland.
'The Secrets We Keep', by Lara Prescott
Seix Barral
The rescue of the microfilmed manuscript of
Doctor Zhivago
, by Borís Pasternak, and its transfer from the Soviet Union to New York becomes in these pages a quasi-spy novel that explains the Cold War and that, at the same time, is a story love of literature and secret heroism.
Lara Prescott has used the declassification of documents to draw the interior landscape of Pasternak (forced not to collect the Nobel Prize), his personal relationships (ecstasy and persecution), the work of secretaries and typists in the offices of the CIA in New York, the
Vatican's
participation
in the propagation of the novel at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels.
Quite nonsense if it hadn't been real.
Lionel Schriver's 'Private Property'
Anagram
The author of
We have to talk about Kevin
brings together a handful of characters obsessed with having, to prosper, to be someone ... Or, at least, not to lose what little they have.
Its effect is comic and sad, tender and maddening.
Only the initial story, that of Gilian and Buba, could have been a novel, one of the best of the year.
'Autumn', by Ali Smith
Nordic
Yes, it was considered the first novel about Brexit.
But that doesn't have to justify anything.
There are three-meter fences crowned by concertinas, security cameras, xenophobic graffiti - "the Spanish couple in the tail of the taxi (...) newcomers (...) have yelled at them to go to their country" -, but Ali Smith also travels (as a replica?) to Swinging London and the legend of the forgotten painter Pauline Boty.
And it addresses old age, the passage of time, identity.
And, with a lot of humor, from the bureaucracy.
Poetic, distressing and attractive book.
It is the first installment of a challenge, the announced
seasonal Quartet
.
When will the next delivery be?
'West of Eden', by Jean Stein
Anagram
A little reportage, a little oral history, a little gossip column ... and, in conclusion, a lady novel.
West of Eden
begins by narrating the rise of the city of Los Angeles as the great city of its time, recounts its years of economic and cultural splendor and rejoices in its slow and theatrical decline.
'The slow life', by Abdelá Taia.
DNA
Abdelá Taia had become known as the narrator of the other side of sex tourism, for telling the story of the Arab boy who reached social, cultural and migratory ascent thanks to a French lover.
Now, the same character faces the disappointment of having stopped being Moroccan without having become French.
'They talk', Miriam Toews
Sixth floor
A chilling report, a portion of incomprehensible picturesqueness and some pages of poignant humanity ... Toews reconstructs the history of serial rapes in a Mennonite community in Bolivia and makes a beautiful portrait of rebellion, of the human capacity to get out. forward in the worst circumstances.
The worst / best of all is that she speaks with knowledge of the facts, she was a memonite, that creed that rejects electric light and avoids any hint of concupiscence.
The rebellion of some of those women, the choice between "doing nothing, stay and fight or leave" shaken beliefs anchored in centuries ago.
There were trials, there were firm convictions, but the example did not spread.
Sometimes reality ...
'The war of the poor', by Éric Vuillard
Tusquets
Vuillard has spent years telling the story of the invisible in Europe with the tools of literature.
In this case its protagonists are the promoters of a peasant rebellion in 16th century Germany, half feverish by an attack of mysticism, half socialist before socialism.
The spread of the Bible translated into the language of the people (so far removed from a Latin that they did not understand) thanks to the recent invention of the printing press breaks a previously peaceful status quo.
"A sez of purity was passing through the country, inflaming the masses, brutally interrupting the old discourse."
And Thomas Müntzer at the epicenter, who "appeals to the Kingdom of God here and now."
And everything, told under the Vuillard label, the same one that dazzled us with
The Order of the Day
.
'The Nickel Boys', by Colson Whitehead
Random House
Whitehead has become the writer who most conscientiously strives to fictionalize the history of the African community in North America. This time, his focus is on idealistic but sinister education designed to turn blacks into good whites.
The setting this time is a fearsome boarding school that only leaves room for survival.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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