My days with the Kopp

Original Language: español

It is one thing to avoid being tendentious to spinning arguments about sagas, friendship relationships, recommendations, etc. and another is that one, unsuccessful, confident, benevolent, take it for what it is not. Contrastapa’s notes on Xita Rubert are, the three, of more or less reputed writers. The three are praise (what else would be expected) and the three cover a restricted (but powerful) spectrum that magnifies the expectation about this novel. They speak of debut, although they strip the author of the condition of debutante, and use the occasional concept that frees the novel from that trembling quality of prima opera that can sometimes raise some suspicion. That is, it seems that the background intends to complete or clarify the reading experience and put ourselves in context.

All of which, given that, regardless of press notes or reviews, the back cover is another promotional element – with the added factor that if you are reading it it is already quite possible that the object is holding in your hands – it has ended up looking like something slightly magnified of what this novel is. My days with the KOPP – Europei Delivery title – collects a situation through a few scenes. So, we would say, this is a short novel, marked by its omissions, outlined in a few strokes. Virginia is a young woman who goes with her father to visit the KOPP, who are going to be a marriage of leftist intellectuals, in which Andrew is going to be officially awarded, and it seems that her dilentant spirit pushes him to dynamite, in some way and in response to the establishmentthe act in which he will be awarded. All this slightly grotesque, as if more than a claim to star in a mischief, the classic performance hypothetically transgressive that usually forgive the old glories within certain areas. That is a subtram of the novel: the answering spirit attributed to a certain generation and its predictable anesthesia. In the visits, between dialogues of low enjundia and a certain game of deceptions, the presence of Bertrand arises, from which the KOPP claim to be parents, a strange individual, affected by some mental condition that has tried to redirect presenting it as a performer (Forgive so much anglicism) and, therefore, the manifestations of their condition are no longer so much and works in which their strange personality is announced. Virginia turns out to be fascinated by the character in question, in a hesitation that is the basis of the narrative, because Bertrand’s behavior is erratic and unpredictable, and the ambiguity of the relationship in his progressive encounters is the narrative spine.

Is this enough? Apart from a correct style, of a slightly hippie-chic atmosphere, of a somewhat uncomfortable tension in its scarce resolution, Rubert’s novel has seemed more sketch, an extended story until not giving more than itself, that this shining work of debut that has insisted on presenting us