A book a day: José Antonio Garriga Vela: Crossroads

Idioma original: Español

Year of publication: 2024

Valuation: It’s very nice

It is difficult to review a book that brings together 104 texts selected from the approximately 1,500 that made up the weekly column. Crossroads, published by José Antonio Garriga Vela in the Malaga newspaper On.

They are texts that cover almost 30 years and could constitute a fragmentary autobiography through the routes of memory and desire. And I say fragmentary because, as the author indicates in The last journey: “life is reduced to those moments of happiness that pass before us beautiful and luminous like the offerings of the sacred river.”

Organized, more or less, according to a thematic criterion, Crossroads It begins in the territory of childhood. There are texts that approach prose poetry and others that border on the purely narrative, entries that range from intimacy to costumbrismo, but usually with a melancholy that does not turn into sappy self-indulgent nostalgia. Fortunately.

But childhood ends and the routes that one draws with one’s fingers on the maps (The borders have changed so much, my things no longer belong to you and all these old books no longer remember how we met. as the song from The Red Room says) become more or less real places, in cities where life and death coexist, in places where life repeats itself with different faces and landscapes, in places populated by ghosts and presences. that say as much about who we are as who we were.

Loneliness, hope, love and desire, literature and travel, the passage of time (how can we ignore it!) are the great themes that run through the texts. But although there is a certain uniformity in the thematic, the same cannot be said about the formal part. Thus, we go from travel literature to poetry, from the witty micro-story to the traveling print, from the almost essayistic to gothic horror, displaying an imaginative and tender look at the same time.

Perhaps because everything comes down, in the end, to returning with imagination and memory to those places where one was happy.

Just one piece of advice for anyone thinking of reading. Crossroads: I recommend going little by little, reading 4 texts today, 3 tomorrow, 5 after a few days, etc. I started reading the book “in one go” and I had the feeling that the texts were devouring each other. Better to give them space and time, to take a breath, gain height and fall when they have to fall. I explain?