This text is published in issue 140 of Letras Libres
Jos and Israel Carranza
The gums stewardess
Mexico, Deck / Universidad de Guadalajara, 2010, 202 pp.
Valeria Luiselli
false papers
Mexico, Sixth Floor, 2010, 106 pp.
If we put in parentheses for a moment's idleness authors grouped in generations, is no doubt noticed the boom that has taken the test writers born after 1970. Beyond the young critics, known within the media, alternating between essay and fiction (Geney Beltrán Felix, Heriberto Yepez), Mexican literature has produced an interesting spectrum of authors that are beginning to find in testing a particular language of expression takes them away from the dominance that the narrative and poetry have enjoyed since almost forever in our letters. Thus we find a range that goes from the literary exploration (José Mariano Leyva) to the light-culturalism (Alzati Fausto Fernandez) from the highly personal and subjective test (Paola Velasco) until assay loaded in equal parts of theory and affect (Jezreel Salazar). In any case, the authors discuss in these few lines, José Israel Carranza and Valeria Luiselli, belong to a broad constellation where the trial emerging gradually seem to find a new role in shaping both the literary digression as freedom of thought.
gums stewardess and false papers share a genealogical origin: the miscellaneous essays by Alfonso Reyes. Although the genre has certainly had considered practitioners (come to mind Adolfo Castanon and Jose de la Colina) actually is a neglected tradition. Although the strict definition of the miscellaneous implies the coexistence of various themes and styles, in fact can be found in both variant alfonsina as presented by the texts of Carranza and Luiselli precise elements: a vocation for filtered by a personal memory Stock culture (think of the file displayed by Reyes in his Memoirs of kitchen and cellar or the Joseph Brodsky Luiselli structured walk through the cemetery), a humorous and light-hearted tone that from the title, provides a sense of playfulness and tentativeness (clearly do random sarcasm of a title as the hostess gums, self-questioning irony of false papers, or securities alfonsinos as Al anvil or the suicide), the construction of a world that is a mixture of personal and literary dose, the mapping of the experience which scriptural factor is as important to their referents (as is clear from tests on women angry Carranza or his "friend Owen", or as did Reyes in his explorations of the concept of a smile or his reading of Fray Servando in the English province).
A comparison between the two books reveals some important differences between two talented practitioners of the same gender. Certainly, Carranza (Guadalajara, 1972) is a writer more done and more experienced (that is, oh fancy for generations, ten years older than Luiselli), and it shows in the admirable prose of his book. Carranza is the author of precise phrases and playful in equal measure "should always rely on the pictures when you are about to declare what will inevitably be taken as a folly," "This means that for absolute freedom in the work, there is only one opportunity, one that arrives when it is necessary to name, owner, what is created. " As seen in both examples, the book of an author accused Carranza comfortable and in full command of his personal literary canon, giving us Text in the roots of the books at first maturity alfonsina (think of the texts of the thirties), solid, almost classic, where everything is in place and well contained. Despite the title and the desire for casual gaming, Carranza is a classic deep essayist, and in it the ease and naturalness are masks stylistic precision and control.
Instead, Luiselli (Mexico City, 1983) offers a book joyfully immature, with a young voice dazzled by their own culture and a broad desire to prove to the world. "After searching for the tomb of Brodsky for several hours and have not found even Stravinsky, I was about to throw in the towel. "This sentence is a case where Brodsky and Stravinsky spare, they note, however, the main virtue of the book Luiselli: his talent is such that these details instead of sounding annoying, are part of what makes the book endearing. As young people follow, Luiselli is a young writer whose enthusiasms lie in the possession of a literate culture can articulate the meaninglessness of modernity: from bicycles and maps to the work sites. If Reyes inhabits the kind of texts Luiselli, Walter Benjamin clearly fills his mind: literary culture and demonstrated carefully acquired from the relevant to what desperate as the only language capable of giving meaning to a life that goes beyond its narrative voice.
Despite differences in age and tone, it is nonetheless striking that, in essence, both books are deeply and thoroughly homesick. If the test worldwide is increasingly in all of its records, a study of discomfort caused by the endless proliferation of cultures, subcultures and counterculture (come to mind Slavoj Zizek in philosophy, Eloy Fernandez Porta in the trial Hispanic Chuck Klostermann in U.S. popular culture or the brilliant viral Immanence Alzati Fausto Fernandez in Mexico), both Carranza and Luiselli appeal to the trial as the last chance to preserve a culture in which literature plays an undeniable epistemic privilege and emotional. For example, Luiselli embarks to counter the chaos of Mexico City, in a reflection on the maps, tracking the first maps of the region to sentence: "The town looked like something then." Meanwhile, Carranza In an essay entitled "May", recreates the classmate who was excited by the Valentine's Day as an icon of an emotional world and lamented lost despite the dismissive tone of voice essays. The essay concludes: "Would someone help me remember how called. "
The point here is that these two books show an exemplary manner the two paradoxes of" youth essay, the writer in media res existential, but articulates the voice of experience: a genre that requires maturity vital immature necessarily practiced by authors and training and, perhaps most important, a kind of freedom and play, however, refugees, young authors of the cultural storm that is approaching. I do not know if that nostalgia is an instance of resistance needed before the chaos of contemporary or hopelessly anachronistic sentenced to extinction. What I do know is that both gums stewardess as false papers are two of the best books of recent Mexican literature and, in the midst of their nostalgia, have returned to find a beauty and a sense of literature, personally, hardened alfonsino I am, thought lost.
0 comments:
Post a Comment