Javier Pérez Andújar has written an enormous novel out of the ordinary absolutely cultured in the full sense of the word. A novel about the word. Not about the given word no: about the words. I'm going to explain myself. I'm going to explain it to you.
His most recent novel The Phenomenal Night which appeared in March of this year opens with a quote by an anonymous author from the th century a phrase belonging to one of the cycles of Arthurian or Arthurian legends specifically the so-called The search for the Holy Grail that seems like a motto for historians:
“Let's go look for what we won't find.”
Pérez Andújar with whom I already learned and had a lot of fun in his extraordinary Catalanes todos where he showed me how much he knows “about Catalonia about Francoism about Francoism in Catalonia about the Catalans and about Francoism and the Catalans and about the Catalans and the Transition” is an outstanding writer. With honors what can I say?
The narrator-protagonist Javier yes Javier like CXB Directory Javier Pérez Andújar does “real magic that is the kind with a trick.” And The Phenomenal Night that the book is titled is a radio program dedicated to parascientific to strange phenomena. Javier tells us about it:
“I came to the paranormal through laughter. To believe you need a sense of humor. "You can't seriously believe in anything."
In the contemplation of writers like Pérez Andújar “what one does and what one is come together.” I think something similar happens to me. It must be something inevitable. There is a lot of that in his novel without a doubt. Or so I think. I am also with the Javier of the novel the narrator-protagonist when he states that “writing is a solitary craft that is practiced among rubble.”
The motto of the program that gives its name to The Phenomenal Night is:
“To understand you must first believe.”
But a listener who called them on one occasion told them: “the other way around is also valid.” To believe do you first have to understand? Another of the crazy characters that populate the book says at one point in the plot:
“It is better to understand than to understand.”
Do I need to understand what Pérez Andújar writes or understand it? In any case Augustine of Hippo already wrote it four centuries after the death of Jesus Christ: “understand to believe believe to understand.”
When I read good fiction I believe everything. It would be missing more. Because those of us who read as Javier the protagonist says “we are never alone.”
The characters in The Phenomenal Night are on one side and the other on one side of reality and on the other side in a parallel reality that perhaps is the true reality: which side are we readers on?
One of them one of the very peculiar characters in the novel says that “words are the animals of language.” And the novel is a hilarious hymn to them to the words a dazzling song in its emotion full of founded unreason:
“Words seem to be made of mercury: they split the same they escape the same they are alive the same.”
It is “a journey to the heart of words” the journey to the heart of words that another character promises to undertake and that in reality when he says such a thing he enlightens us readers about what we are really reading: a journey with the excuse of reading a hilarious plot.
發表於 14:05:13
