En Bezzia Today we want to discover five readings that take us back to a key time in our lives, youth, through its protagonists. Protagonists of different countries and cultures for whom the narrated experiences are key to their growth and development. Most have already reached the bookstores, but to read one you will have to wait until next November.
Sand
Michelangelo West
Tusquets Editores SA
Hot beers, vespines, dead time on the white sand of the beach ... An endless and sticky summer somewhere on the Malaga coast and the feeling that nothing good is going to come out of the Bruno's marginal adolescence, who narrates his own adventures and those of his group of friends. And although his father tells him to leave comics and novels and enroll in law, the truth is that neither his parents nor the friends they frequent preach by example, and Bruno must decide his future without counting on his family.
I'll wake up in Shibuya
Anna Top
Nordica Books
When seventeen-year-old Jana arrives in her dream Tokyo, she wishes to stay forever. She is soon convinced of the unpredictable consequences of her wish: she will be locked up for seven years in the magic circle of the bustling Shibuya neighborhood. While the young version of Jana wanders through the city, experiences extraordinary situations and finds her way back home, the twenty-four-year-old Jana studies Japonology in Prague. He aspires to get a scholarship in Tokyo and, together with a fellow student, breaks his head with the translation of a Japanese story. Written with a pleasant, fresh and colloquial language, the first novel by the young Japanese scientist Anna Cima deals with the search for a path to a different culture, from the ambiguity of the real world and the trap of a dream come true.
I will wake up in Shibuya has been the great discovery of Czech literature last year. It was chosen Book of the Year 2019 from the Czech Republic and received the Magnesia Award for Best First Novel.
A girl is a half done thing
Eimear McBride
Impediment
Winner of the Desmond Elliot, Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year (2014), A Girl is a Half-done Thing is one of the most influential books in recent English-language fiction. A dazzling novel about thoughts, sexual awakening, and discomfort of an irish girlto rush into adulthood, continually addressing a "you": his younger brother, seriously ill. The trauma of the disease runs through the text in brutal detail, and the challenging tone and distressing atmosphere, due to her mother's unwavering Catholic faith, merge to illuminate a powerful and extreme way of relating to the world. Joyce, Beckett, Edna O'Brien or Virginia Woolf are just some of the names that cross the landscape that McBride draws. A fierce story that does not tell us about living, but about surviving.
Holidays in the Caucasus
Maria Iordanidu
Acantilado
One morning in July 1914, Ana, a teenage girl from Constantinople, leaves the family home where he lives with his beloved grandmother Loxandra to spend a month of vacation in Stavropol, in the Caucasus. However, as soon as the journey begins, she loses her aunt among the crowd at the Batumi station, from where they were to leave together. After two months wandering around Russia, she finally arrives in Stavropol, where she has to find a job as an English teacher to get ahead. Against all odds, the outbreak of the First World War and the Russian Revolution will prevent him from returning home for five years, during which he learns Russian, becomes fond of Slavic cuisine, adapts to the long winters, makes the customs of his new family and knows love.
María Iordanidu threads in Holidays in the Caucasus such a fast-paced and emotional like his own life, which recounts with the same freshness, dynamism and unmistakable sense of humor with which he already gave life to his unforgettable Loxandra.
And you, so happy?
Barbara Carvacho
Troy Horse
«Abort It's one of the most important things that happened to me, maybe one of the best. There is no drug that can be compared to the well-being that power to choose gives us in a state that has us in chains, following orders like the sheep in the herd, those that get pregnant, those of free domestic work, those that prepare food. It's horrible to write and read, but don't forget about our passion. Not the one you felt when they consentedly touched your breasts for the first time. No. The one you felt when you left a toxic relationship, the one that took you when you aborted, the one that flooded you when you left on March 8th. Passion, that of Power. Abort, or love, or advance, or abdicate, or warn, or accuse.
This is Barbara's story, young middle class student, sociable, in love, lacking sexual education, who without any planning gets pregnant and who decides to interrupt the pregnancy in a country where this practice is illegal. Barbara decides to end the pregnancy clandestinely, which leads her to meet other women in the same situation. Beyond abortion -told here from the very entrails- And you, so happy? It is an X-ray of machismo in Chile, and by extension in Latin America, and by extension in the world, which the journalist Bárbara Carvacho bravely reels off in her first book.
Which of these five readings would you like to read?