A book a day: José Alejandro Adamuz: A possible life

Original language: Español

Year of publication: 2023

Valuation: Highly recommended

Juliana González-Rivera says in the also magnificent The invention of travel that the trip “it is a metaphor for life, death, knowledge, writing”, that the journey is, at the same time, “a footprint and a wound.” There is all that (and more) in this A possible life by the journalist, writer and traveler José Alejandro Adamuz.

The premise of the text is the trip that the author took with his partner, back in 2014, through Latin America. Two years in which leaving Costa Rica, the couple went up (only on the map?) to Mexico City and down (only on the map?) to the mythical and magnetic city of Ushuaia.

But it is not only the 8,716 kilometers in a straight line that go from the Aztec capital to the capital at the end of the world. It has also been almost 10 years from the beginning of the trip to the publication of the book. And just as physical space obviously conditions the trip and the narrative, time acts as a filter on memory and recollection and means that the trip does not end with the return home.

In this sense, the author works on these double aspects, that of the trip itself and that of the memory of the trip, through the two presents that come together in the text, and he does so through two times that overlap, that of the present of the narrative itself and the present of the events. To these two times we must add the past, the times of the great journeys and of the travelers who wrote (or were they perhaps writers who traveled?): Kapuscinski, Chatwin, Humboldt… References or milestones on the path that We travel with the aim of returning to tell it, like Odysseus.

With this, the trip itself moves a little from the center of the story (it is clear that there are landscapes and people, there is anecdote explaining the world) and this is occupied by reflections on the trip itself, on the writing, on the history and the evolution of traveling and how to do it.

History, journalism, anthropology, utopias and failures, curiosities, historical-literary references, etc. in a text that I think can only be blamed for having focused too much on the outside (at least I would have liked to look a little more towards the outside). inside) but which is a true delight for any lover of travel and literature, whether travel or not. And if, in addition, they are a bit mythomaniac, honey on flakes.

PS: Days after writing the review, a verse from the song comes to mind Sightseeing from the Valencian Julio Bustamante who says: “Walking, writing, thinking, perhaps drinking, what are they but ways of praying?”. There is something like that in this book, I don’t know if I understand it.