2023-12-28 19:46:41
The second and hard-fought assault in the publishing season and the first of 2024, places heavyweights from all genres in the literary ring. The Christmas campaign, crucial for book sales, concludes and a new battle for the reader begins with important ‘fighters’ such as Eduardo Mendoza, Paul Auster, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, Annie Ernaux, Alice Munro and Luis Landero. There will be editorial news from all of them in 2024, the year in which the editorial course will open with the ruling of the Nadal Prize, which will become octogenarian on Three Kings Day. A year full of anniversaries, such as the bicentennial of Lord Byron and the centenaries of Franz Kafka, Joseh Conrad, Truman Capote, Luis Martín Santos or Francisco Nieva. All with new editions.
Eduardo Mendoza, winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2016, returns at the end of January with ‘Three Enigmas for the Organization’ (Seix Barral), where he resumes his hilarious satirical vein. This time with nine researchers who remember the brainless and nameless man from ‘The Labyrinth of Olives’. They are atrabilious members of a secret government organization who face three perhaps connected cases in the Barcelona of 2022: the appearance of a body in a hotel on Las Ramblas, the disappearance of a British millionaire on his yacht and the bizarre finances of Conservas Fernández .
Mired in his battle against cancer, the American and Princess of Asturias winner Paul Auster returns in February with ‘Baumgartner’ (Seix Barral). It is a journey through the memories of a lifetime of the prestigious writer and university professor Sy Baumgartner. Auster’s wife, Siri Hustvedt, also awarded the Princess of Asturias, announced her husband’s illness without suggesting that this novel could be the New York writer’s last.
Unfinished?
Against the odds and with anticipated controversy, the posthumous and unfinished novel will arrive in March? of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. Rescued by his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, ‘In August See You’ (Random House) will appear on March 6, the day Gabo would turn 97 years old. It is put together with five stories starring Ana Magdalena Bach, who every August 16 takes a ferry to go to the island where her mother is buried. For its editors it is “a song to life, to the resistance of enjoyment despite the passage of time and to feminine desire.” It represents the resurrection of the patriarch of magical realism and author of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, who died in Mexico on April 17, 2014. A Gabo who reviewed and corrected his originals up to a dozen times, who read this novel in Madrid 25 years ago. years, but he never finished it.
Also in April, ‘Cuchillo’ (Random House), new memoirs by Salman Rushdie subtitled ‘Meditations after an attempted murder’, is published. It focuses on the savage attack that mutilated and partially blinded the Anglo-Indian writer in 2022. A brainless man stabbed him in New York more than three decades after Ayatollah Khomeini dictated the fatwa against the writer after the publication of ‘The Satanic Verses’ in 1988. “It was necessary for me to write this book: a way of taking charge of what happened and to respond to violence with art,” explained the eternal Nobel contender.
Recent Princess of Asturias Award winner and also waiting for a Nobel Prize that eludes him, the Japanese Haruki Murakami publishes in March ‘The city and its uncertain walls’ (Tusquets). It is the first long novel in six years from the author of ‘Tokyo blues’, ‘Kafka on the shore’ and ‘1Q84’. It revisits a novel from 1980 with its recurring themes: heartbreak, dreams and alternative worlds. It focuses on the meeting of two nameless teenagers: Me (Boku), and You, (Kimi). Its protagonist is torn between two worlds: a quiet isolated city in which there is no desire or suffering, or the real world full of pain, desire and contradictions.
Ernaux y Munro
The French Annie Ernaux and the Canadian Alice Munro do have the Nobel Prize. By Ernaux, ‘What They Say or Nothing’ (Cabaret Voltaire) is published in May, an autofiction about a mature and lost teenager that follows ‘The Empty Closets’ and precedes ‘The Frozen Woman’. In January, Munro publishes ‘Everything stays at home’ (Lumen), a selection by the writer herself of her stories about everyday life and emotions.
Pierre Lemaitre publishes ‘The Children of Disaster’ (Salamandra), the second installment of ‘The Glorious Years’. This time he recounts the stages after the Second World War to talk about the emancipation of women, abortion and the strikes of the sixties.
The Italian Andrea Camilleri resurrects for the reader with two unpublished: ‘Samuele’s Private War and Other Stories of Vigàta’ (Salamandra) with the late author’s vision of modern Italy, and ‘The Forgotten Massacre’ (Destino), about the massacre occurred in Sicily in 1848.
The fake interviews that a young and unknown Enrique Vila-Matas ‘snuck’ into Fotogramas are gathered under the title ‘NMK8. Enrique Vila-Matas. Eight fabricated interviews’ (H&O). They are fictional conversations with Marlon Brando, Juan Antonio Bardem, Rudolf Nureyev, Francisco Rovira Beleta, Anthony Burgess, Cornelius Castoriadis and Patricia Highsmith.
Luis Landero returns to the editorial scene in January with ‘The last function’ (Tusquets). Humor prevails in this novel set in the Madrid mountains with a retired actor, retired friends, the search for an actress and a performance to alleviate the rural emptiness.
Sergio Ramírez publishes ‘The Golden Horse’ (Alfaguara) in January. The Nicaraguan Cervantes Prize, banned in his country by the Daniel Ortega regime and installed in Spain, narrates the arrival in Nicaragua of a carousel from the Carpathians with four strange and unfortunate characters.
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