He had looked forward to his death. Margarida prayed and hoped that the passage from life to death would be like a glorious, exultant transition. But when she died, she was not received by the angels nor by the hand of God, but by a chorus of old, “dirty and tasteless” women: her relatives. Now she watches and waits for Bernadette’s death. I Gave You My Eyes and You Looked at the Darkness is the third novel by Irene Solá, the award-winning and applauded author of Canto Yo y Bain las Montañas. Published by Anagrama, the new novel by the Spanish writer is a story of women, ghosts and legends. The story takes place in one day, between dawn and night, and includes stories that span centuries.
In an old rural house, a group of women speak from beyond the grave, remembering and reliving the family’s history, marked by a pact with the devil. The narrative voice passes from one point of view to another. Thus, the memories of Joana, the matriarch who made and broke the pact with the devil, intersect; Margarida, who lacks a quarter of a heart but has plenty of anger; Blanca, who was born without a tongue, and Bernadette, who has no eyelashes but sees what she perhaps shouldn’t.
Written with great agility and expressive richness, with humor, rhythm and enormous grace, the novel plays with light and darkness, laughter and tragedy, memory and oblivion. Endowed with imagination and beauty, the narrative tells an infinite number of stories, compresses and expands time and gives a voice to those women who do not usually star in the story.
An exceptional heat wave was experienced in July in Rome. During that month, the meeting of the International Quaternary Association took place there, the last of the great geological periods. One of the topics of conversation at the congress was how the study of fossils could contribute to the conservation of endangered species. And in that context, “it was announced that the first de-extinct baby mammoth would come into our lives in 2027,” says Natalia Villavicencio, a specialist in paleobiology. Using the remains of frozen mammoths found in the Arctic, this genetic material will be introduced into the genome of the Asian elephant. The hybrid embryos would be implanted in the elephants to see the birth of a new animal, part elephant and part a de-extinct mammoth. It is not science fiction or Jurassic Park: it is the project of the company Colossal Bioscience, which seeks to revive extinct species.
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This is one of the data that the author provides in this essay, which begins with her search for rodent paleoburrows in the Atacama Desert, in 2007, and moves in time and space to wonder about the causes of the extinction of species. Written in simple language and armed with astonishing figures and findings, the author invites you on a journey of billions of years through paleoecology, or the ecology of the past: the study that allows us to reconstruct extinct ecosystems and that could yield information to understand the current climate crisis.
“It is a true story/ This one that I present to you/ Stored in the center/ Of the local culture/ The natural landscape/ So typical of Talcahuano/ It gives the power to this hand/ And to its letters with history/ To maintain the memory / As the years go by.” This is how Madre Mar begins, the book written in tenths by Paloma Valenzuela and with illustrations in white, black and blue by Carla Vaccaro. The text is inspired by the true story of Johanna Cárdenas, who at the age of 15 fell into the sea from a cliff while she was posing for a photo. The teenager was swept away by the waves that hit hard; She immediately began the search and for 48 hours she feared the worst. But the Sea is the “first mother,” because she “conceived the entire life,” says the poem.
“And that is why a prayer/ Consecrated to its power/ You can hear and see/ That legendary night.” They look for her in the sand and in the sea. Divers go down into the deep waters. “And they find the cavity/ That like a pregnant uterus/ The navigating girl/ It protected in the darkness/ It’s not fiction, it’s reality/ The divers say in amazement/ Well, after having called/ Johana by her name/ Very calmly she answers them/ That they have finally found her.” Ediciones Mis Raíces publishes this beautiful text in popular verses, with evocative illustrations that play with the resonances of blue and the shapes of rocks, and which tells a mysterious and miraculous story: that of a girl who thought she was lost and was reborn since the sea.
2023-10-07 00:43:23
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