“Flamenco Sunday” by Olivier Schrauwen: An Extraordinary and Fascinating Work Dominates This Week’s Book Reviews by Babelia

Leaving testimony throughout 500 pages of a single day—Sunday, to make things even more boring—of the life of your most boring cousin seems uninteresting. A priori, it is quite reluctant to do so. And, of course, reading the comic doesn’t produce much enthusiasm either. But things change, and a lot, if the author is Olivier Schrauwen, author of extraordinary and avant-garde titles such as the three volumes of Arsène Schrauwen or the magnificent Parallel Lives. In flamenco sundayOlivier Schrauwen displays the happy and tiring day of his cousin Thibault as if the sticky tedium of each daily act were an unconscious generator of memory, “of those memories that come to our mind for no apparent reason, like those quantum fluctuations subjected only to to the capricious mandate of probabilistic chance,” as our expert Álvaro Pons explains in his review of this interesting title, of which he adds: “Without a doubt, a work as monumental as it is fascinating, destined to endure.”

In a very different register, the historic correspondent Bru Rovira takes his small revenge for the massive layoffs that put thousands of journalists on the streets after the economic crisis of 2008, discarded by the media due to the blindness of their managers. which made them decapitalize on their best talents. Kill the director It represents a catharsis in the face of an ominous era of the press. A cathartic book.

Other titles reviewed this week in Babelia are I’m Milena from Praguein which the Czech writer living in Spain Monika Zgustova portrays a brave woman, Milena Jesenská, also Czech, who shone as a journalist, intellectual and resistance to Nazism, although she was best known for translating and being Kafka’s lover; The Spanish Wara brief compilation of texts written by the French philosopher Simone Weil after her time in the Spanish Civil War, in which her ethical confusion is revealed, as a convinced pacifist, in the face of the tragic events that she experienced firsthand; Left is not wokein which Susan Neiman tries to distinguish between an authentic left to which she subscribes, heir to Enlightenment values, versus the ravings of another abandoned to the excesses of identity politics, which has perhaps abandoned the field of ideas to confront the populist right; Plato of Athens, an interesting biography of the thinker written by Robin Waterfield; and Egilona, ​​queen of Hispaniaby José Soto Chica, who has rescued and fictionalized the figure of a woman who was the wife of Don Rodrigo, the last Gothic king, and then the first vali of al-Andalus, Abd al-Azid.

Furthermore, an article by Ana Rodríguez Fischer reviews several volumes that rescue the work of the Catalan author Ana María Moix on the tenth anniversary of her death; and Jordi Amat recovers, on the 60th anniversary of his death, the figure of Agustí Calvet, Gaziel, war chronicler, political analyst, literary critic or spectator of urban life, which he formed together with Manuel Chaves Nogales, Josep Pla, Ramón J Sender or Eugeni Xammar a quarter of a century of great reporting.

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2024-03-29 05:12:46
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