Long Books

There are books that I enjoy reading and others that I try to understand, and Mariana Enriquez’s Nuestra parte de noche falls into the first group; because of the way the stories of Juan and Gaspar are hilando (woven together), one on top of the other, because of the mixture of supernatural events and the monotonous details of routine, of everyday life in the life of a boy who tries to live like any other teenager: “Gaspar se paró malhumorado; había dormido, era cierto, notaba el gusto a sueño en…read more

Desperate books, or books that cause desperation? I am sure that every reader has a type of literature they feel comfortable with, a kind of literature they enjoy and with which falling asleep is not an option; a literature and a type of stories, of narratives, that holds the reader’s attention word by word and surely differs from one reader to another. Even for the same reader, narratives and literature become different, and are approached with different emotional perceptions as the years go by, and perhaps the same book can…read more

Reading the first chapter of the Nuestra parte de noche (Our share of night), by Mariana Enriquez, called Las garras del dios vivo, enero de 1981 (the claws of the living god, January 1981), has been an astonishing, impressive, experience accompanied by cosas imposibles (impossible things) while everyday life has to continue in the non-routinary life of the father and son, Juan and Gaspar, the main characters who, through a journey in Argentina, are learning to recognize themselves without the mother’s presence.  In my first reading, it was the relationship…read more

Los detectives salvajes in this first part have overwhelmed me with lists of poets and books that seem endless, a vertiginous number of lists that go round and round until you get tired of them. At first, I vaguely considered keeping these lists in mind, for example, the list of books that Juan García Madero identifies on 11 de Noviembre; but after a few more pages and a few more lists, including those of streets and friends, I gave up and preferred to refer to Umberto Eco (2010) and his…read more

  Hello everyone. My name is “Perfect” […] My parents gave me my name. They said that when I was a baby, I looked like such a perfect child no matter which way they turned me. But as I grew up, things changed. My parents kept asking more of me; the school kept demanding better performance. I am so tired. I just want to scream: “I am not perfect!” My Little Perfect World. Jimmy Liao I’m not perfect, that is true! And my name is not Perfect, that is true…read more