2023-05-21 00:24:46
Sunday, May 21, 2023, 00:24
Humor is not easy to handle. And, as surprising as it may seem, the literature that revolves around him also has no prestige in terms of critics and awards. Eduardo Mendoza is one of the few novelists who, among us, has won very relevant awards with a catalog of works in which humorous novels abound. Although perhaps it is more correct to say that he has achieved these awards ‘despite’ those novels.
There is also a factor that marks humorous literature, as it marks the cinema of the same genre: its brevity. You can write a thousand-page drama or shoot a three-hour drama. The same cannot be done with a story whose basic ingredient is humor. It is no coincidence that the films of the Marx brothers or Woody Allen are short. So Álex Oviedo delves into that terrain with this story of just 150 pages in a small format book that tells what happens in a few days. The protagonist is a communication consultant who on the first page witnesses the robbery of a neighbor’s apartment. From there, he fears meeting the thieves again while he must deal with an injury that forces him to carry a crutch, a job he doesn’t like and from which he is about to be fired, a girlfriend who is no longer such, and a woman with whom you would like to have a relationship.
All this, with continuous references to the cinema, dialogues that seem to be taken from a Spanish comedy and a slight criticism of the malfunctioning of so many things, hypocrisy and so on. Álex Oviedo just wants us readers to smile while we follow the adventures of his protagonist –sometimes we even suffer a little with him and we are happy about some small success– and he succeeds.
#day #Álex #Oviedo