noise and echo
by Ricardo Álamo
Curzio Malaparte defended in one of his books that a diary is a portrait, chronicle, story, memory and history and that it should have the logic of a narrative: a beginning, a development and a conclusion. Another thing is the notes taken day by day – this writer put together –, which are not a diary, but just moments chosen at random in the current of time, in the river of the passing day. If we followed this arbitrary distinction, Noise and Echo could be defined more as a notebook than as a diary, given that we can find among its pages – apparently random – reading notes, the evocation of a summer from distant childhood, the adventures of a young student in a northern city, reflections on growing old, on whether or not it is a diary or the memory of his father who worked as a ditero… But in reality this book is built with everything that Malaparte asked for: chronicle, story, memory and history. Although life is not told here as something linear that ends but as what it really is: noise and echo, voices and hours from the past that return. A time that passed but at the same time, is still present when remembering and writing it.
Ricardo Álamo (Sanlúcar de Barrameda, 1965). Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona. He has been a contributor to the “Culturas” supplement of the Diario de Cádiz and the Diario de Sevilla. He has cultivated the story, the short story, the diary, poetry and essays in books such as Imaginarium, Stations of Way, Black Tales, Writers Naked. Proust and Bolaño Questionnaires, Imaginary Lives and Deaths, Minimum Effort, Plagiarios & Cía and he was coordinator-editor of the book La gura escurridiza. About Juan Bonilla. He has also published A Thousand Aphorisms about Love and Other Passions as well as the miscellaneous book In the Name of the Name. He has always lived from, by and for reading. Faced with noise and its echo, he loves silence.
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/ruido-y-eco