Love is in the art
Ricardo Menéndez Salmon, the light is older than love. Seix Barral, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b2010.
Menendez Salmon have recently read three novels, published by Seix Barral and the three parts of a trilogy of Evil, which certified its entry in a literary mainstream. The first, The offense, perhaps my favorite, is a work of unusual beauty, ambitious and with a perfect structure, harmonica. The second is Collapse , irregular but thoughtful foray into the thriller of moral depth and the third Corrector, a brave idea (a novel about 11M) weighed down by characters and scenes that came to camp more than moral response to the Thomas Bernhard (stronger reference in the novel, despite the explicit reference to Demons headed the plot). These are not your only works well in winter philosophy, early work introduces the space Asturian esteemed author and dialogues, such as Shout , storybook uneven quality, have an interest in the issues.
The light is older than love is a novel that seeks to shelve this trilogy and started on the road hinted at the end of Corrector, a more optimistic and spiritual. Salmon Menéndez quite often flirts with moral pessimism, quasi-nihilist, near or Sebald Celan, a bleak vision of history as a field of destruction, but is, above all, a mystic, a rather odd, because his mysticism is born of love and art, the second an element as important as the first. Combined with a dye autofiction essays, is a succession of stories of three painters, two fictional characters (Aurelio de Robertis and Vsevolod Semiasin) and one real (the expressionist painter Mark Rothko). What these artists have in common is their ability to produce unique works, demolition, axfisiantes environments, although the case of Russia is more special is structured as a mystery in his biography, a possible meeting with the Russian dictator Stalin. Semiasin life goes with the anguish of an art market eclipsed perhaps for the S11, while Rothko is evoked as the product key, love, holding much of the thesis of the book (which only love and create art or make us look a little less miserable). Menendez Salmon, with a very fine education in philosophy, has the talent to turn his speech into something important and do it with a strictly contemporary novel, it is testing, and historical fiction autofiction without these contrasts stop adding layers to your thesis or make it more evocative and accurate, more unusual, pure.
easy digestion surprising influences Menéndez Salmon undertaken by both the variety of styles, and by the amazing ease with which the author makes his own, without a mass, almost never, precursors. The first part deals with a twelfth-century painter named Aurelio de Robertis, author of The Virgin bearded box and assimilation is one of the brightest I've seen of Pierre Michon, French writer with a fondness for stories and nouvelles and a keen sense of prose and irony, always sharp perspective on some unusual historical narrative. Salmon michoniana accurately describes the dreams and ambitions of an inquisitor busy to destroy the picture of the painter.
Beaufort inspires loud while watching how the rate of entanglement in the bearded impostor. The virility of the cardinal deacon - women who look with a bow that conceals nothing languorous passions and whose fingers, square and strong, seem made for living flesh bless and sleep on skins fragrant - clenches his fists burying his desire to beat De Robertis .
O
dreams
unexpected, brutal, sudden, Adriano de Robertis, the noble (and fictional) painter of the picture The bearded virgin that disrupts the plans of a repressive world:
pain chest dazzled him one evening, as if someone stabbed him in the hour of siesta, and unbearable during the passage of the fifteen minutes it takes to die (leaning against a wall of the empty dining hall, without the strength to scream or ask for help with staring at a ceiling that outlines paths without genius asthenic angels and the figure of God the Father syrupy, but enthusiastic disciples of those ancient cruelty of Beaufort became instruments of hate), while conquering arm pain left trigeminal and flowers all over his body with intolerable fury, De Robertis assail him two memories: that of his Virgin Barbuda and a conversation between these walls clothe his death now
What Menéndez inherited from Michon Salmon is the use of language to be specific to always express the views of his characters, their feelings and naked with surprising clarity. Throughout the first part, the author's voice is absent and only the story speaks for itself.
The brief story of discovering a literary Bocanegra has let Enrique Vila-Matas and for a moment, Menéndez Salmon on the style of the teacher. But Vila-Matas is essentially the great artist termite English literature, if I import the end of the critical Film and painter Manny Farber. Salmon is pure Art Menéndez Elephant why Bocanegra's story soon delve more in a tone close to both Sebald (the walk through the ruins worship and contemporary literature, with affinity in elegant similes film) and Philip Roth (care a sentimental vulgarity that surrounds sex, love, decrepitude of the disease) but bathed in the mystical name as the author. Here a test:
No oracles for love. No omens. There are no sacred words. Love happens, like the sea or meteors. Love is a stellar phenomenon, love is a puñada in the back, love is .
and dig deeper still into this idea:
So lovers jump from the bridges of ships, from the rooftops of abandoned Macel, from the gargoyles of old cathedrals bombed without pity or innocence. Do not kill dissatisfaction. Are killed surfeit of enthusiasm. Their bodies are bodies mined with joy. Her ecstasy is the genius, that of you crazy, that of the Abnormal.
There are errors, of course, but none is decisive. The character Alphonse is two dimensional, only the fringes service narrative and uninteresting, and the voice of Semiasin is too similar to that of Bocanegra / RMMS in meditation and is less vivid character in the story by far. However, there is something Shakespearean monologue in this small Russian painter, is therefore greatness
False is a heavy word, Alphonse - disagrees Semiasin- Anything I can remember that day, any details you can bring to light some scented keep quiemra, because in reality, there is something chimerical in a painter, however great which may come to be shared, even for half an hour, the same space that a person like Stalin. Imagine Michelangelo to Julius II. Imagine Velázquez to King World. Imagine aa Rigaud to Louis XIV. What are they? Nothing, a breath of air, a lump of vanity, beauty irrelevant to men whose will change borders, turn off lives, ancestral debts cords. So the three views that Stalin gave reporters some truth, just as it is possible that some of today I am telling you is not the whole truth. Of course who do care about a case as bad as the truth?
also very funny epilogue, which reveals a decidedly narcissistic imagination (Bocanegra has received the Nobel Prize and his first wife and daughter looked at him with admiration rendered; also assures us that have written great works, including The light is ancient love, this book began in 2008), but it serves to deliver a beautiful speech and take the higher ground autofiction own JM Coetzee (Elizabeth Costello or Diary of a Bad Year take two examples), relating to articulate perfect Autofiction which combine personal speeches slightly autobiographical interesting variations with no little skill. Coetzee is not close in terms of quality or of courage on this issue because South Africa is an author with a more problematic and interesting literary incarnations, but the sense of closure meets bride and confirms the remarkable virtues of this strange book, Lucky, a sweeping talent and intelligence.
The beauty is known flag, beauty is not publicly traded, beauty is not a fuel or a raw material. Its mystery is its futility, to be a road from nowhere and leads nowhere. But then, I humbly ask what good the Perugino Crucifixion of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, which I imagine is still there, thirty-five years after my view, nearly five and a half centuries after it was conceived [...]
And humbly reply that as literature, as every word I've written throughout my life, Perugino's Crucifixion of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi serves to comfort, to get rid of the affliction of a world in which human dignity is crucified every single day