Martin Caparros. A day in the life of God

Original language: español
Year of publication: 2021
Valuation: recommendable

If there is something that attracts about anything that Martín Caparrós publishes, it is precisely the ability to expect anything. I believe, I am not able to explain the reasons, that he is one of the most uninhibited and self-conscious writers roaming the planet. He is able to behave with ease, jumping between styles, always sharp in his analysis, with that somewhat insolent audacity that those who have been writing for years usually allow themselves. Because Caparrós is a writer by trade and the first condition of his works is the good use of language, exquisite rather than clownish, cultured and rich without boasting of erudition.

A day in the life of God It would look like a joke in anyone else’s hands. A kind of fable in which God is an official in a gigantic universe who, like a teenager with a package of plasticine, is in charge of modeling worlds, and in his play he decides to endow a third petrusco of life and let some people pass through it capriciously. bugs that, evolving capriciously and uncontrollably, begin to develop a current of consciousness that pushes them to wonder about their origin and to recreate, completely speculative, the existence of a creator. An approach that in the hands of others could be laughable in Caparrós is particularly attractive. The God enters the body of certain humans, as part of his game while he decides, from a strictly official point of view, what to do with this invention that has gotten out of hand. He will be a Greek fighter, a slave, a scientist in ancient times, a component of the Manhattan Project research team. He enters into his personality, experiences his physical and psychological experiences, all because he wants to understand or explain how those beings with which he has populated the world petrusco They have ended up complicating their lives.

Curious: the reader is not entirely sure if Caparrós makes an allegation of atheism, an undermined criticism of humanity’s obsession with finding causes and explanations in everything material, even in the last section of the book he seems to alert us that the latter ( for now) step by altering matter in its smallest expression within the research of nuclear devices could be the definitive step forward from the edge of the abyss. It is not that the ecological alibi takes the helm of the story, rather that Caparrós has to close that kind of Greatest Hits in that it has passed through the different strata of the different eras that are usually taken as milestones of humanity. At all times he has maintained a difficult balance between what could be grotesque and what some would judge as pedantic or pretentious. It has been placed at the right distance to wink at all types of readers, from which they can appreciate the book as a (somewhat elongated) joke about the constant need of the human intellect to find explanations and a critique (now more defined) to construct. the image of the divinities as cruel judges to whom we fear and pay homage. There few creeds are free and Caparrós (embodying that female God) distributes slaps by delegation, demonstrating the absurdity of those religions based on fear and genuflection. These are surely the fragments in which the work appears most prosaic and critical, when in some of the previous incarnations Caparrós has perhaps veered in a somewhat heavy way towards the purely philosophical. In any case, as a whole, a literary experiment more than an attempt to reason the contemporary skepticism of the Western world towards beliefs.

Also from Martín Caparrós in ULAD: Here