2023-12-23 23:23:38
2023 has been a turbulent year in many aspects. The world of culture has suffered its own vicissitudes, such as having to deal with cases of censorship typical of another era or the emergence of AI, creating a scenario unprecedented until now. But nothing has changed that it has also been the lifesaver of intellect and hearts to face the day to day, whatever its ups and downs.
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Literature has more than fulfilled its own mission. Production continues to be massive within a publishing market that seems to have no end, but that also provides jewels that make a mark and that invite you to stop time to dedicate to each page, the pause and attention that they need. To understand them, enjoy them, take advantage of their capacity for evasion and reflection, let them change us, shake us and stir us. And since we ask and at the same time thank them for their nature, why not, to make us a little better. Making a selection of the best that has been published has not been easy, but these are the eleven titles published this year that deserved their own section in the 2023 cultural yearbook.
1. ‘The bad habit’, Alana S. Portero (Seix Barral)
The Madrid writer’s look at trans childhood and youth in Madrid in the eighties and nineties has earned honors as one of the most outstanding books of the year; for the rawness, heartbreak and singularity with which he manages to make reading it shake and shock. Narrated in first person, the first novel by the author of The room of the drowned, covers the adolescence of a girl trapped in a body she does not know how to inhabit, who tries to understand herself and the world in which she lives, where every step she takes is accompanied by violence. She “she Talks about strengthening ties and losing them. Also about how we are a little clumsy sometimes to strengthen ties no matter how much we want to,” Alana S. Portero explained to my partner Elena Cabrera in this interview about her volume.
2. ‘The Married Portrait’, Maggie O’Farrell (Asteroid)
After the prodigious Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell has retold the story of an exceptional woman in an absolutely hostile world. In this case that of Lucrezia Médici in Florence in the mid-16th century. A quiet girl with great talent for drawing that she develops in her particular and quiet place within the palazzo, until the death of her sister María places her in the center of attention. She takes over as wife of the son of the Duke of Ferrara, at whose court she is received with suspicion. She is only 15 years old, but the goal expected of her, to provide an heir to the title as soon as possible, becomes her top priority anyway. The result is an exciting new exercise in goldsmithing about power and the fight for survival.
3. ‘I just wanted to dance’, Greta García
The dancer, choreographer, theater and circus director Greta García made her debut in the novel with a text that pushes you to reflect, invites you to action, disheartens, makes you laugh, disgusts, traps and irritates because of how real it is. And she did it by writing in Andalusian and through Pili, a dancer who is locked up in jail for, as she herself describes, “becoming a terrorist” and “rebelling against the institution and democracy.” The writer acknowledged to this newspaper that more than having written the novel, she seems to have vomited it. Because of how real it is, because of how it embraces how eschatological and explicit it is regardless of the topic it addresses; whether it is sexual desire, fatigue with power or the meaninglessness of pressure.
4. ‘The kneeling man’, Agustín Gómez Arcos (Cabaret Voltaire)
The writer from Almería, who was exiled during the dictatorship, died in 1998, forgotten by his country but still a star in France. Cabaret Voltaire has published this year The kneeling man, one of his novels that had not yet been translated. The author stuck his darts into them in the Transition and the Madrid movement, through a man who travels to the south in search of money and then to Madrid, to see that the poor never count, neither for the dictator nor for the socialists. His story is a criticism of the consumer society in which the gap between those who have the most and those who have the least is increasingly widening. And he poses his own answer to the big question he himself poses: “Once on our knees, can we ever get up?”
5. ‘The books of James’, Olga Tokarczuk (Anagram)
The winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature is responsible for this volume that traces the adventures of Jacob Frank, a man who proclaimed himself the Messiah in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment. During the second half of the 18th century, this young Jew reinvented himself again and again, traveling through two empires (the Habsburgs and the Ottomans), professed three religions, angered the authorities, gathered disciples and created a sect that advocated breaking taboos. and practiced, according to some rumors, orgiastic rites and bacchanals.
The author acknowledged during her visit to Spain last September that she wanted to use the figure of this figure that had been erased from the imagination to explore “the relationships established between newcomers and those who are already there. I found it fantastic to tell the point of view of the first. “People who stop living their tradition with their languages and customs and who, when faced with a new situation, are forced to negotiate.”
6. ‘Fortuna’, Hernan Diaz (Anagram)
The Argentine writer has signed this novel that explores the ins and outs of the power of money, greed and ambition through the story of Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen, who dominated New York in the 1920s. He, as a financial magnate who amasses a fortune, and she as the daughter of some eccentric aristocrats. However, as the decade comes to an end, and their excesses reveal a dark side, suspicions begin to surround the couple. The author composes a literary puzzle in which he adds voices, confronting versions that complement and contradict each other, confronting the reader with the limits between reality and fiction. As well as the truth and the manipulated version of it. Fortuna is an ingenious game of mirrors that explores all the layers of American capitalism.
7. ‘Dear Asshole’, Virgine Despentes (Random House)
In her latest book, the Frenchwoman has put together a portrait of the MeToo society, the perplexity of men in the face of the new scenario, the caricature that some have tried to make of this era, online harassment and the consequences that reporting it has for victims. And she does it through three characters: a canceled man, a forgotten actress and a young woman who accuses the writer for whom she was the press officer of sexual abuse. “Online violence against women is as serious as others, it is real violence. And there is no answer,” Despentes stated to my colleague Ana Requena in this interview, about one of the conflicts that she addresses in the volume.
8. ‘En tren’, Erin Williams (Godall Ediciones)
“My brain would like to forget what it feels like to be treated only as a body, an assembly of holes.” This is just one of the reflections that Erin Williams vomits in the graphic novel By train. autobiography of shame. A book that stings because of how direct, visceral and uncomfortable it is, in its immersion in the mind, heart and bowels of a woman who, from the moment she gets up until she goes to bed – including getting to and from work – shares how she feels. at every moment, including memories of the men who abused them. Also about her problematic relationship with drugs and alcohol; that in certain episodes of her life it has been the best and certainly not the healthiest tool to dissociate from herself, push herself to the limit, forget, suffer and even chain herself.
9. ‘Because of a flower’, María Medem (Apa Apa and Blackie Books)
The Sevillian cartoonist signs this graphic novel whose protagonist lives in a ruined town with no other company than dogs and a special flower, which seems to react to her feelings. She reminds him of better times, of the hubbub of the town and the fertility of the fields, now filled with desolate landscapes of a dying rural world. Medem devised the story through an article that she had to illustrate about a man from the Amazon jungle, the last of his tribe. “From there I came up with the story, but then I took it to my imagination,” he explained to my colleague Gerardo Vilches, about an imaginary that has a lot to do with folklore and the Andalusian landscape.
10. ‘Lessons’, Ian McEwan (Anagram)
Ian McEwan tours in Lessons the great international political events that occurred from the second half of the 20th century through the life of Roland Baines, a character who functions as another self of the British author in some of his circumstances. As a child, the character was sent to a boarding school where he had a fascinating and traumatic experience in equal parts with his piano teacher. Over time he also moves on with his life, although the moment his wife, Alissa, leaves him without explanation, the foundations of his reality shake and he is forced to reconstruct all his memories to try to understand what happened. happened. “I am interested in how these events with capital letters are able to penetrate our lives on a more intimate level,” explained the author in the presentation of the copy.
11. ‘The woman that I am’, Britney Spears (Plaza y Janés)
Britney Spears’ memoirs have been one of the most powerful testimonies of the year, because of how, finally, the singer took ownership of her own story. Free from the gag that has kept her controlled, infantilized and at times even tutored during the 41st year of her life; The singer has opened up on the channel to tell in first person episodes such as the painful abortion she underwent without going to the hospital after becoming pregnant with Justin Timberlake. Plus why she shaved her head in 2007 and how her kiss with Madonna came about during her performance at the MTV Music Awards in 2003.
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