have you read *Tierra de la Gran Promesa"? I started reading it but left it for some reason… I wonder if La Casa Pierde is a better starting point
Vargas Llosa Nightmare blunt rotation draft pick #1
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I have not just happened to read that short story and liked it don’t know the author too well
I would like to ask him about Arguedas though. But other than that yeesh lol
I dont really like it tbh
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Going to try to answer by parts.
I have kind of a beef with Ignacio Echevarría. He seems like a better Andreu Jaume, in the sense that he’s willing to go beyond the canon and try to search for something better, but he’s still a conservative academic, and I don’t tend to trust academics in this country (it’s because of them and those that came before them that the only prestigious novels are realistic). This is my beef, of course. As for the stories, I’d have wished that Retahílas was there, as it is a pseudorealistic novel that leans a bit onto the classical fantastic writing.
Also, I expected that, but glad to have found Juan Benet is there.
Once I finish Cao Xueqin’s book, this is toing to be the next to read. Either this or Si te dicen que caí.
Don’t know if you read it, but this is probably one of my favorite novels. It’s not something groundbreaking, but the premise allows for a very intriguing story until the end, which is when the story kind of falls flat. In a way, I think this has attracted me the way Malick hadn’t in film.
I have a friend in Madrid that is a big fan of Gopegui and introduced me La escala de los mapas, a novel that, if I can at some point in time, I’d adapt into film since it is kind of if Raúl Ruiz did a story about the themes Gopegui did. I want to read this, but since I trust my friend, he said that Gopegui is still great here, but starts to fall flat. Once said this, I’ve gotta say he has been a great writer for the 2000s and forward.
This I recommend. It’s a experimental novel of a writer that managed to portray in a very short span of days (not the days he wrote, but the days happening in the novel) the misery of Spain in the postwar and the Franco regime, which was trying to appease to the US and the European countries but was in fact a very underdeveloped and miserly country in so many ways. It’s an amazing one for me, not because it’s polished, but because it’s daring and frictional (he was a psychologist).
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thanks I appreciate the insight as always. Spanish from Spain is a major blind spot for me unfortunately.
Agree that the Echevarría list is broadly conservative, but it looked at least idiosyncratic for all that. There are a few obvious picks but a number that seem a bit odd (that’s the Carpentier? That one for Donoso? etc) that make me more curious about some of these smaller and less well known books. Plus I appreciated the specificity of including individual short pieces. And in addition I can’t totally dismiss anyone repping Los rios profundos…
yes I like it a lot and I think you’re describing it well. A quiet and outwardly simple book really beautiful yeah
speaking of this Saer I think you’d really like Los rios profundos if you havent read that one before. Not too long worth giving it a shot. It’s very much it’s own thing so not a great comparison to Saer and Ruiz but it’s got a similarly deep and engrossing atmosphere
I’ll take an eye for this one, since I love those kind of atmospheres.
In any case, the book I want to read 100% out of the list is Respiración artificial. I’m reading Parmenides at the moment, and on parallel The image-movement by Deleuze (it’s more of a rereading, but well).
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it’s good!
I did manage to get through “El fiord” - it’s real wild and lives up to the reputation. I don’t know exactly what to say about it bc I suspect a lot of the politics seemed to be focused on Argentina in the late 1960s and what do I know. A little confused as to why I’d seen it described as a novel (or am I imagining things): it’s about 20 pages long. When I think of points of comparison I come up with something beyond the most grotesque Burroughs and more I dont really want to say “conventional” but more legible as narrative fiction and attuned to storytelling than like eden eden eden. Really interesting writer and I can see why he has a cult following and is totally repellent to everyone else lol. For those wondering what it’s about well I’m not sure but I would say it’s an in medias res narrative of what appear to be political figures of some kind of militaristic/charismatic cabal beginning with one of them giving birth to I guess like a demonic creature and then a whole lot of insane surrealistic violence. I’m relieved to see that the rest of the work included in these collected editions is similarly brief bc the text is extremely dense and I don’t think I could fight through another long novel in the same style. I guess I did the hard stuff first with Tadeys.
And then speaking of which I’ve been thinking about a kind of subgenre of fiction it might belong to and I’m not sure what to call it. But it’s like non-SFF depictions of fictional polities that’s larger in just a made up city like Metropolis in the comics eg, and is also realistic. So this is what I have so far:
The Freelance Pallbearers - Ishamel Reed
Lapvona - Otessa Mosfegh
Love and Rockets (the Palomar stuff) - Gilbert Hernandez
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
Orsinian Tales - Ursula K. Le Guin
Shardik and Maia - Richard Adams
Tadeys - Osvaldo Lamborghini
Is this anything?
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a bend in the river comes to mind, probably some stuff by krasznahorkai, aira, or delillo. a good device for sure.
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i have been inspired by bluesky to read some john steinbeck finally
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Nice choice. There was a time when he was my #1 favourite author. Which book are you going to read?
da grapes of wrath baybeee. once i found out he had to carry a gun after he wrote it i’m on board
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I didn’t know that, that’s awesome lol
Poniatowska’s Lilus Kikus is a lovely one-sitting read if anyone is on the market for those. It’s an endearing story about a girl named Lilus Kikus and her life in her neighborhood and the characters in it. The drawings by Leonora Carrington in it are really cool too. I would love to have this one physically if I happened upon it at a bookstore.
I borrowed Hasta no verte, Jesús mio from the library but it has yet to get here. I started with this one because Sandra Cisneros mentioned it as part inspiration for House on Mango Street and I can definitely see the similarities. Lilus Kikus is much more lighthearted and more “charming” whereas Mango Street is much more explicitly about Heavy Shit one deals with as a child.
I also finished Brother, I am Dying by Edwidge Danticat and absolutely loved it, though it is a very tragic story. I decided to get more familiar with literature from my island and I think I’m going to stay in the Danticat world for a while. I’m looking forward to reading Krik? Krak! when it arrives.
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My friends keep trying to convince me that I need to read Sapiens but I honestly don’t want to. Do I just say it’s not for me? Or should I play pretend that I read it? Has anyone been in a similar position before lol
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that’s like the ultimate “coworker who reads” book (maybe second to books called like the planemaker’s wife). i remember hearing some interviews with the author on NPR years ago when it first came out that were halfway interesting but everything i’ve read about him since makes me think he’s a bit of a psued takes one to know one?
anyway, i usually just deflect and ask people to tell me more about why they like the book. if for some reason i’m really pressed to read something i’ll just “add it to the list” and move on.
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I think you should read it and have a nice time with your friends 
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Read Humankind by Rutger Bregman to start the year. Made my dark little heart feel pretty good. It looks at a bunch of popular stories and scientific experiments that are commonly used to defend the view that humans are mainly selfish animals and digs a little deeper to find what actually happened in those situations. Turns out, in a lot of cases, things were not as they seemed, in fact they were the absolute opposite. Guy finds a real example of a Lord Of The Flies situation in a news clipping from 40 years ago, tracks down the living survivors and goes to the other side of the world to find them. Gotta love it. It’s not often that a book single-handedly changes my mind about something, but I think this one did. There are so many things about today’s world that make cynicism seem like the only rational conclusion, and this book is a welcome bit of counter-programming to push back a little bit in the other direction.
I know it looks like a Sapiens type thing by the cover, but it’s more like David Graeber’s style, approaching common beliefs with a sort of lateral thinking that presents them in a new light, and accepting various possibilities rather than coming out with an absolute theory.
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I’ve been curious about that book because of the cover so thanks for clarifying that, I might check it out now that I persuaded myself to read Sapiens in the spirit of friendship.
Heavily considering reading The Dawn of Everything so I can round it out and make more of a journey of it.
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i bought this a few weeks ago and plan on read it soon
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2025 the year of the IC Book Club?
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