Let me, from this first line, make it clear to you that when I speak of two autumnal novels I am not referring at all to the age of their authors – it would only be missing – nor to the melancholy that permeates that season of the year for many, especially now that we have already changed the time. It’s not that, no. Rather, this is the moment when I have read these two frankly fabulous stories; And the thing is that, despite the long summer that followed, there is something of autumn in the two books, an aroma of chestnuts and forests with leaves rotting on the wet grass.
Anyway, where we are going, which is that I have read two novels by both authors that by chance have happened to me over time and which are, I will be clear, the best I have read in a good season. Or what has impressed me the most about writers that I did not know. Both published by editorials that – I hope they are not offended – we could classify as little known, not to call them small, but that have had a remarkable and enviable success with these two authors.
I already warned you that it may not be easy to get hold of these two books, things from the distribution (which I would give for a long separate article), but I assure you that getting them will be worth it.
Elisabeth is patriot and anti-Semitic, while grandmother Mati aspires to rural revolution
The Asturian journalist Begoña Quesada has published Born after death with Rasmia Ediciones. It is his first fiction book, if I am not mistaken. I had previously written Germany, the essential country , a journalistic work that I am already looking for and have not yet read. I discovered Begoña Quesada at the Hay Festival in Segovia. And getting to his book has taken some patient waiting time, but reading it has more than made up for the effort of ordering it and waiting for it. The novel has an indisputable protagonist, Elisabeth Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, who already in the opening scene of the book reveals herself to us as the careerist despot that she probably was. She is waiting and looking forward to the arrival of Adolf Hitler, that there is no doubt from the first pages that he embodies for her the best of a reborn Germany. And she is already, in turn, the sister of the genius and something like the matriarch that governs the German spirit. She is also a reborn. Nationalist and patriot, clearly anti-Semitic (like her hideous husband), the guardian of the essences of Friedrich Nietzsche has not hesitated to manipulate him at will. He has edited it, rewritten it, falsified it, and concealed and probably destroyed parts of his work. Because she is Nietzsche and Nietzsche is Germany. And the apotheosis of German strength are
the Nazis and their delusions of racial purity.
Portrait of Elisabeth Nietzsche, protagonist of the novel Born After Dead
It is useless for Quesada to pretend at times that we empathize with Elisabeth. He has been a hateful, manipulative and weak character at the same time, strong in his web of lies, longings and insecurities. This novel does not find an answer to the old question of how something like Nazism was possible in cultured and civilized Germany, but it places us before what seems to be reproduced at times in these technological times: that a lie repeated enough times becomes in a truth and that, it is undeniable, the road to hell is paved with the best intentions.
A woman brought up to be a lady ends up being an instigator and genius of evil, participating in no crime other than promoting the worst intentions through the supposed good cause. Wagner and other characters in the story come across in a narrative that teaches us how fragile memory is and how manipulable someone’s ideas are. The novel begins high, but continues to grow more and more oppressive as it progresses. If it is published in German, I will look forward to the first reviews of this book by Begoña Quesada. Because I don’t know if there is nationalism that supports seeing itself in its reflection on the dark glass of this mirror, more quicksilver than light.
I already warn you that it may not be easy to get hold of these two books, things from the distribution
The second novel that has occupied me is, in many respects, radically different. A choral novel, with many characters, that can almost be read like a storybook stitched together by the life adventures of a grandson and his grandmother, Untimely , by Silvia Bardelás, is published in Spanish by De Conatus, with a translation from Galician by Moisés Barcia. Bardelás, who writes his work in Galician, has already published several books. And the general director of AIE (the Association of Interpreters or Executives), José Luis Sevillano, got me out of my ignorance about it, who even got me the book, in Spanish because he didn’t trust my Galician. And it is another sensational novel, in which Galicia is the silent protagonist. Lois, who has been raised by her grandmother, returns from Boston to Galicia to meet again with Mati, a grandmother who aspires to, let’s say, a rural revolution in which the unbelieving and almost syndicated priest of the town collaborates. A novel of the village and of the return, it is soon seen that one never returns to the past. And that the years, like the lost loves, passed to another who we are no longer. If Quesada’s style is at times dry, almost abrupt, efficient and naked as contaminated by the German and bombastic soul that permeates her story, Bardelás is a writer with a slow and hypnotic rhythm, persistent like the Galician orballo. One does not escape from oneself or from the life that was and to which it is difficult to return. One, in short, always lives out of time, unless he is Nietzsche’s sister and believes that time is always in his favor.
There is no room for more, but let me repeat that they are two admirable novels and that, even if they leave an autumn lingering in your hearts, they will be with you for much longer than this now darkening season. Hope you enjoy them!
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