Twenty Books (and Then Some) from 2020

If you put two hundred horses in an closed-off space where everything edible is three meters off the ground and you go away for a hundred years, when you come back you’ll find yourself with twenty giraffes. That’s the way it is, it’s a well-known fact. By the same token and for similar reasons, a concentrated number of writers writing, reading, and publishing in the same medium and at the same time, will result in similarities, likenesses and tendencies that are not necessarily bad but are often impoverishing. The bad news, among so many pieces of tragic news, in this, the strangest and most unusual year of our lives, is that all the overly familiar melodies of the period kept on developing, growing, and taking up 90% of all available space, shop windows and public attention. Some of these books that were so “obedient ”to fashion were very, very good, of course, but there is always something a little sorry about obedience. The good news is that other books broke out of what was foreseeable in the market for prestigious literature (a small market but a market nonetheless) and found a niche of their own. Now, with the year winding down, it is time to take stock, and even if lists are in effect somewhat juvenile, not to say ridiculous, in times as frantic as the ones we are living in, it is still a chance to vindicate valuable books, and there can never be too much of that: some of the books that are cited here don´t need to be cited but others perhaps do, I’m not sure.

Since what matters most to me is poetry, that is where I demand the most and am stingiest with praise: almost by definition, the best book of the year in the years when Eloy Sánchez Rosillo publishes, has to be his. This year he brought us La rama verde [The Green Bough] (Tusquets), and it is, and could not be otherwise, another radiant, authentic book, full of menaced light and wounded peace, but which ends in incontestable joy. I want to applaud two other books as well, only two, by poets I knew absolutely nothing about when I read them and who in my opinion have given us master classes in very different kinds of aesthetics: the poet Juan F. Rivero from Seville has given us a stunning book in Las hogueras azules [The Blue Bonfires] (Candaya), with seven or eight perfect, dazzling poems, with an ancient wisdom threading through all of its pages, or hovering over them. In Compro oro [Gold Purchased Here] (Letra Versal) the Malaga poet Violeta Niebla has shown that a theme as prosaic as money or economic precariousness can give rise to a new “social poetry” which is more the second than the first, radically engaged, raw, street-smart and domestic as it is, with a genuine and fecund anger brimming with talent. These two wonderful publishers, Candaya and Letra Versal, are oddly enough, the same that have published two of the most confused and confusing books of 2020 (Historia de la leche [Story of Milk], by Mónica Ojeda and Excepción [Exception], by Lyss Duval), but let’s not kid ourselves: in general the still-young authors have once again put the more established authors to shame. If we compare the intelligence of Gestar un tópico [Giving Birth to a Commonplace) by Azahara Alonso (Ril) with Olvido García’s book, or if we compare Antonio Lucas’ inquiry in Los desnudos [The Naked] (Visor) with César Antonio Molina’s manner in his book, or the intensity of Ángelo Néstore in Hágase mi voluntad [My Will Be Done] (Pre-Textos) with that of Chantal Maillard in Medea, or Lidia Bravo’s lighthearted touch in La muerte de Christopher Reeve [The Death of Christopher Reeve] (Pre-Textos), compared to Alvaro Salvador’s complacency…, we will conclude that the paternalism generally issuing from established poetry is, once again, for yet another year, embarrassing, And this may incidentally give pause to those who cling to the label “young poetry” and who don´t see much future in something that, by definition (or one might say despite itself), does indeed have one.

Turning to prose, one must begin by saying that the traditional separation between fiction and non-fiction has definitely been blown to bits. Both playing fields continue to exist, of course, but now there not only exists but there predominates another one which lies midway between them, that of testimonial literature, the “non-fiction novel”, personal chronicles, diaries… I cannot help distinguishing between those three great prose domains and, beginning with the ever more abundant “stories of the self”, I will mention five especially brilliant ones this year that is about to come to an end: to begin with, Madrid by Andrés Trapiello (Destino) is a book that in and of itself would salvage the year in publishing, because it is, literally, a book of a lifetime; it is about the life and the eye of Spain’s best living prosewriter. There will be those who think that I am exaggerating: I (and his readers) know that my praise falls short. Elsewhere, Miguel Pardeza, with Angelópolis [Renacimiento] continued what he began a few years ago in Torneo [Tournament], the marvellous conversion into literature of a glorious but also rollercoastering career in sports. From it he extracts a magic that is not that of scoring goals but of meditating on what he is living through, self-awareness, the need for analysis, which is a need—sometimes an angushed, pressing need— for redemption. I confess that I normally read more than one book at a time, I fit them all in, I skip from one to the the other, but I did not do this the two days I spent reading La piel [Skin](Alfaguara) by Sergio del Molino, because it is a book so varied and diverse in and of itself that it already provided for a change in register and in focus, in tempo and tone. It is not a book about psoriasis: it is, like all the books that we like and matter to us, a book about everything and about nothing. The same is true of Ya sentarás cabeza [You’ll Soon Settle Down](Libros del Asteroide), the best diary of the year and a new book by the best Spanish writer of his age, Ignacio Peyró. The funny thing is that diaries are the literary genre people usually turn to when they don´t have a story to tell. That is not the case with Peyró, for which reason its interest is all the greater: not only is he an exceptional chronicler of routine; he also, in what is a kind of secret Bildungsroman, comes to know ever higher corridors of power and to find himself in the middle of the main rumour mill, politics, and he tells it historically; the ministers he talks about will be forgotten; his story will not. And the fifth personal book worth singling out is Libro de familia [Family Record] (Seix Barral), by the writer from Bilbao Galder Reguera: now, to be perfectly honest, I am beginning to have no stomach for somebody’s telling me his life, but when it is told like this, frankly, and with nobility and a goodness impossible to feign, one is utterly disarmed. A man dies the same day he has learned that he will be a father; it’s an extraordinary fact that gives rise to more trivial occurrences but, as they are well interwoven, they build a phenomenal parable and a memorable book.

Moving in the same terrain of the personal are two extraordinary books that take photography as their pretext: Los Wattlebled (Fracaso Books), in which Paco Gómez returns to the memorable spirit of Los Modlin, and finds the thread of a magical story (and photography), full of loose ends and stimuli, in the Rastro [Madrid’s Flea Market]; and the Tractatus Lógico-Photographicus (Galaxia Gutenberg), by Ricky Dávila, the maddest book of the year and also one of the most vibrant, original and beautiful, the creation of an alter ego in streaming, fictionalizing, perhaps out of timidity, the magnificent and real photographic work by Dávila.

In non-fiction, three masters are on hand: in El hijo del chofer [The Chauffeur’s Son] (Tusquets) Jordi Amat, courageous and brilliant, has drawn a portrait of a group of flatterers, opportunists and bystanders who, more or less cleverly, more or less honestly, moved in the circles around the very powerful Josep Pla when the man´s overwehelming intellectual magnitude gave him, in his apparent retirement at his Catalan farm, a real effective power, and where a journalist whose name I do not wish to recall climbed to success and then ended up in the most extreme degradation and debasement. Juan Arnau has given us a synthesis in the Historia de la imaginación [History of the Imagination](Espasa) of all that he knows about the subject, and that is a lot, offering a history that runs parallel to human thought, in which religion is now no longer excluded but neither are dreams, the irrational, the creative… Antonio Pau surveyed his favorite Herejes [Heretics] (Trotta), with that marvellous mixture of learning and lightness of touch that characterizes everything he writes, with rigor and simplicity conspiring in favor of the reader and the book.

And moving on now to the fiction “we all know and love”, and conscious that I am running out of space, two extraordinary short story collections: Juegos de niñas [Little Girl Games] (Pre-Textos), by José María Conget from Zaragoza, and Antes del Paraíso [Before Paradise] (Páginas de espuma) by Pedro Ugarte, from Bilbao. The first author, whose work I have always greedily devoured, is giving us more of the same, which is all to the good, because “the same” is literature of the highest calibre, full of good nature and malice, of love of life and of mundane suspicions, of feeling oneself saved and at the same time, rubbed raw, without incurring in contradiction. And Ugarte, whom I had never read, is a master of the ordinary, a sage of the day- to- day, an incisive observer of what is small, yes, of things so small that they condition our lives, blessing them or destroying them. In 2020 I have not read any novel as intelligent, tender and moving as Poeta chileno [Chilean Poet] (Anagrama) by Alejandro Zambra (also hailing from Chile was the chief narrative masterpiece published in Spain in 2019: I´ll never tire of praising and recommending Kramp (Alianza), by María José Ferrada). And, for their part, Juan Gómez Bárcena and Jon Bilbao, respectively, through Ni siquiera los muertos [Not Even the Dead] (Sexto Piso) and Basilisco [Basilisk] (Impedimenta), both looking toward America, gave us what one would expect of the best Spanish writers today; books at the top of their game, strong steps forward which, nonetheless, when it comes to prizes, come up against rivals in the “obligatory”, the “comfortable”, the “unquestionable”…the exceedingly boring.

Anna R. Ximenós has offered us a wonderful novel on an almost untouched topic in Vidas lentas [Slow Lives] (Pre-Textos): therapeutic companions, people who take care of and help others —male and female— who are at risk of social exclusion, or who have recently been released from jail, or who make the rounds of mental institutions. The progressivist buzz that one senses behind her opinions (which are justifiable; she knows what she’s talling about) finally convinced me. As did the mistrust of a certain administrative or medical inertia, the rejection of some kinds of medication, or the elegant protest over the insoluble plight in which some find themselves, absolutely abandoned to their fate. Dicen los síntomas [Telling the Symptoms] by Bárbara Blasco (Tusquets), which is also oriented around hospitals and hospitality, is another novel full of “goodhearted anger” (buena mala leche), and is almost as sarcastic as its disillusioned protagonist, but in the end likable, salvific, as is certainly the case, too, of Los últimos románticos [The Last Romantics], by Txani Rodríguez (Seix Barral), in which a kind of Amélie from the Bilbao area pours out her goodheartedness, her philanthropic strategies and her “conspiratorial plots” in a context of strikes and industrial action in the factories of Llodio.

In Elástico de sombra [Shadow Elastic] (Sexto Piso) the Columbian writer Juan Cárdenas once again wove together magic and the cry for social justice. And making its appearance for the first time in Spanish was Ramon Saizarbitoria’s first book, Porque empieza cada día [Because Every Day Begins] (Erein), an elegant and reasoned defense of abortion, which, because it was written in Basque, got past the censor in 1969, thus inaugurating a narrative oeuvre that has never been less than excellent. On the other hand, unfortunately, a lot of “under the table” literature (literatura solapada) was published; very bad books that slip through because of their canonical publishers and are to literature what Bustamante is to music: does Bustamante know how to sing? I’d say absolutely not, but OK, let’s grant him a little skill. Do these writers I allude to write well? I think not but let’s make an effort and say, all right, they get the job done, but…why are they doing the job? For whom? Driven by what motives? The other day, while talking to the singer and songwriter María Rodés (author, by the way, of the nicest Spanish record of 2020, Lilith), we agreed that it was unlikely that anything that didn´t have a secret inner light, or soul, or that wasn´t conceived out of affection and truth could be any good… If the writerly skill (I will not say talent) of those ladies and gentlemen is put at the service of that kind of perception of reality, of their incapacity not to repress editorial wishes even if they have nothing genuine to say, or if it is at their own service…, they can count on me to stand up to them, or, better said, to turn my back on them, celebrating any one of the twenty books I have have singled out here, which are the ones that count.