2023-06-30 04:00:39
Milio Rodriguez Cueto represents a very relevant and valuable xeitu to the current Asturian culture. He speaks and writes in Asturian and Spanish, wins prizes in two languages, is a first class teacher and has a fine and effective sense of humor. And it happens-and that because Milio, the very discreet one, was and is one of the most serious ideologues of Asturianism and spends, to say what touches me, an accurate philosophical background. Both in the speech that he has and, as far as I know, in his own citizen aitions. This is what leads me to deal a little more with her novel “Fortuna”, which won the I Premiu de Novela Curtia “Andrés Solar” 2021 and which was published on vtp editorial in 2022. , in magazines and in think tanks.
It is said that “Fortuna” is a tale of horrors. No N. In reality, it tells what happens to a middle-aged couple when they run into a wall and on a festive day a blind cat –that is the protagonist– and how they unravel the things for many hours until the problem of the evil animal is solved afayaíza thanks to the institutions of this democratic and social state. And it will be true that there are symbolic dreams and detailed descriptions of the hospital environment and other similar ones (the author boasts exact knowledge of the various medical concepts). But none of that serves as strength to a supposed overcoming of a non-existent crisis of the human couple. The couple –daveres– is limited to behaving civilly in the midst of the incidents. I got that Greek pallabru of “peripecia”. It will be time to remember what Milio Rodríguez Cueto envisions taking into account: that the horrible and the terrifying are not equivalent and above all that, as Aristotle He made it clear, the monster in general comes to be still beautiful when it is the art that paints it.
Original and cult artist Milio Rodriguez Cueto introduced in “Fortuna” a gay series of surprises. First of all, the title. Thus, he and she baptize the cat at the end of the catharsis. “Fortuna” because lucky she was inside the life of a deathly sick animal. And with that they will not remember her –he and she– as people. There is a philosophical beginning there, typical of animal theory. Peter Singer, the classic of that philosophy, left him with that formula: animals are virtually people, and pets, house animals, are only dafechu in the time in which human beings live in friendship. Well fortunately, then, for “Fortuna”, but also because it is a purely intraliterary surprise: it appears only in the last lines of the text, not before. Just like’n “La Charteuse de Parma” by Stendhal, where the conventu carthusian salt is called only in the last paragraph. Another surprise: the dedication of the novel. On page seven (without number) a single word appears: Shell. Not “for Shell”, or “to Shell”.
Well, that, in the short but not small novel by the Xixon author, one notices a domestic and self-referential air (but not biographical) that s’arreya to a certain linguistic realism. In the formal and serious style of a simple and popular Asturian language, but not proof of a more sophisticated vocabulary, the evident Spanish of the characters who interact with a long-term heterosexual couple is brought together in the story. And that on August 15 in L’Arena, Pravia, Xixón and more or less ugly rustic-industrial redolada. Proposals of Milio’s inventiveness. He was the one who wrote that famous comparison in this newspaper some time ago: “It was a Galician empanada, yes, but the size of a flamenco triptych.”
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