A book a day: Russell Banks: Los Abandonos

Original Language: English

Títutulu Original: Foregone

Year of publication: 2022

Translation: Benito Gómez Ibáñez

Valoración: quite recommended

This is the penultimate novel by its author, who died in 2023 without having the impact of other US novelists of, we will say it, first line, such as Cormac Mc Carthy or Philip Roth. And I must recognize that the reading of The abandonments It has raised me a something repeat restal about the question of the literary landscape of his country: yes, as it is usually repeated, it is a world that bases its enormous impact on its powerful promotional apparatus- prizes, publications, powerful editorial groups or if, as I often leaned out to think, it is a society that, within its defects and contradictions, treasures the circumstances propitious to generate an ecosystem where some ecosystem where some ecosystem of their secondary figures can have a great draft flashes.

This is what happened to me with Banks, and although The abandonments It is far from being a dazzling novel to the first sensation, after a few days and time to face this review, it has a persistence that, in the face of the recent ability of too many novels to be read and forgotten with such ease, work much in its favor. Not only that, that perspective enriches it and makes it accumulate something like layers of consistency and cohesion. With which, what we could simplify as a situation novel is projected in several areas and covers from a certain political prism to a retrospective social criticism and even a sour picture of how today’s society amortizes and squeezes its myths for the sake of an alleged artistic alibi.

Leonard Figfe is in the last days of his existence. Attended by a nurse who deals with him before his wife’s circumspect, he has lent he Focos, cameras, in a discontinuous dialogue with their interviewers because their forces have already begun to falter. Figfe decides to undress his soul through these interviews, a decision that manifests itself with the forcefulness and determination of those who time is drained, but that is nuanced by everything that concurs in that confession: his controversial vital decisions, the life he left behind when he decided to cross the border, his couples, his children, the alleged conflict of interest between the political commitment of a certain time and personal fears. The book traces and goings that we can blame for his own personality, his legitimate desire to be at peace with himself and with those whom he could cause harm. Banks could be taken all the world’s licenses, from temporary jumps of decades ago and ahead from the medicalized room, to passages that seem to devacked or even delusions combined by the memory traps and the effects of pain palliative medications. That game brings enormous depth to the novel, which as soon as it can be interpreted as a sour chronicle of physical decline as a context of ideals, those of the finals of the sixties, full of traps and contradictions.