‘Letters from New York’, by Diego Gómez Pickering

There is the city obsessed with sex and death Philip Roth nor the one Woody Allen imagined as a comedy of customs nor that of the after hour seasoned with heroin from Anthony BUrdubut rather the city of an adopted son, as are many of its inhabitants. Diego Gómez Pickering he looks with familiarity and at the same time with wonder, registers with the curiosity of a newcomer and the malice of an old customer. Maybe that’s why New York Letters (Taurus) is so attractive from start to finish: he has a bipolar gait.

The book, of which I only miss a map that serves as a guide for the strolling reader, brings together 22 chronicles that sometimes take the form of a story, a missive, a historical evocation or a traveler’s diary. In search of a sense of proximity, it starts with a homemade stamp dated in April 2020, with the frame of a ghostly landscape, and closes with an exhortation to the eternal life of New York anchored in June 2016, when the present was only a monstrous real estate project.

There are no architecture or cloisters of political and economic power. There is also no place for enclaves of sports or film fame. Gómez Pickering likes voices and knows how to coordinate them. Proceed in the manner of a choir director. Thus we listen to the blonde who announces the wonders of an amusement park in Coney Island, the Puerto Rican activist, the enlightened Trump, the Russian-flavored clientele in a Brooklyn restaurant, the solicitous Ecuadorian waiter, the irate customer of an establishment where Spanish is spoken, the transsexual who idolizes Juan Gabriel. In this way, rather than in the Tower of Babel, an image already haggard and tired, we think of a kind of cultural ecosystem.

In addition to a vision that defines a temperament, a weakness, a memory, a scar, a figure, a destination, a flavor …, New York Letters it contains a good number of strong opinions. I keep a dozen but I offer this as an invitation to read and travel without leaving home:

“The Big Apple, as the epitome of the country, and starting with its own nickname, is the land of the superlatives, of excesses, of the supreme, of the maximums, of the superiors, of the sums. It is the land of supremacy ”.

​AQ

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