Pau Luque: “When you look for reasons to justify outbursts you fall into something worse: rationalized violence”

2024-03-21 21:38:48

Making a book of short stories out of the episodes of a person’s life and, in addition, these have digression and content – that is, they are intelligent and interesting – is within the reach of few talents, among them Javier Marías or Paul Auster , authors of a literature that is neither necessarily moral, nor moralizing, nor essential, but full of nuances of a depth much greater than what appears from the line between its pages. In this league Pau Luque seems to play with Field (Anagrama, 2024), a light, short and seductive book, well written and above all full of a soul in constant paradox.

Because it is the paradoxes that articulate Field, a brief and enigmatic title that, like the rest of the book, hides many surprises and reflections beneath that monosyllabic parsimony. It is the third installment by Luque, professor of Philosophy of Law at the Institute of Philosophical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), for Anagrama after the essays Moral hypochondria (2022) with Natalia Carrillo and Things as they are and other fantasies. Morality, imagination and narrative art (2020), which also won the Anagrama Essay Award. I had previously written Secession in the wolf’s domain (Catarata, 2018), an essay on the process.