About the book
The prestigious filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar returns to his role as a writer with a surprising unpublished volume of stories that collects his private production over decades, from adolescence to maturity.
On sale Thursday, April 13.
A first-rate event: we present the “secret writer” Pedro Almodóvar, who after a long editorial silence opens wide the doors of his intimate literary world to us. A book that has aroused enormous international interest and whose translation rights into other languages have already been sold to a total of 20 countries.
The last dream constitutes an editorial event of the first order: the return to literature of an author, Pedro Almodovar , whose cinema is impregnated with the love of books and writing. At the presentation in 2002 of the book with the script by Talk to her, Juan José Millás described him perfectly: “He is a film director who has the head of a writer.” The twelve unpublished stories that make up The last dream , compiled and archived for years by Lola García, his assistant and right-hand woman throughout the decades (and to whom the book is dedicated), this is demonstrated. In them we find the most intimate and stark Almodóvar, the one who speaks of loneliness, death and the vicissitudes of artistic creation, but also the Almodóvar more settled in pure fiction, the one who plays with the mixture of genres, with traditional narrative structures and with the unprejudiced combination between low and high culture. The last dream therefore, is the definitive self-portrait of an artist defined by imbuing all of his creations with his unique personality.
The last dream It will also be released as a very special audiobook in which the author himself has been fully involved, including some of his regular collaborators. Own Pedro Almodovar narrates the dedication, the initial quote and the introduction to the audiobook, and renowned actresses and actors, such as Blanca Portillo, Carlos Cuevas, Àlex Monner, Carmen Machi, Israel Elejalde and Pedro Casablanc, narrate the different stories that make up the work. In addition, the audiobook includes music by Alberto Iglesias, a regular collaborator of Almodovar and composer of all the soundtracks of his films since The flower of my secret (nineteen ninety five). The interest that the book (the first one Pedro Almodovar has been publishing since 1991, the year of release of his previous collection of texts, Patty Diphusa) has arisen at the international level is unappealable: The last dream It has been sold, so far, to 20 countries, including the USA, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Portugal and Israel.
The vocation of writer Almodovar It is one of the recurring themes in this collection of stories. In the introduction he explains: «I knew myself as a writer since I was a child, I always wrote. If there was one thing I was clear about, it was my literary vocation, and if there’s one thing I’m not sure about, it’s my achievements. The story that addresses this topic in a more direct way is the autobiographical A Bad Novel, which begins this way: «I always dreamed of writing a bad novel. At first, as a young boy, my aspiration was to become a writer, to write a great novel. Over time, reality showed me that what I wrote ended up becoming short films, first in super 8 mm and then into feature films that were released in theaters and were successful. “I understood that those texts were not literary stories, but sketches of film scripts.”. This paragraph seems to describe the tone of the story that opens the book, The Visit, written at the end of the sixties and, therefore, before the beginning of his film career. Almodóvar. The visit, whose starting point – the unexpected visit of an exuberant woman to the director of a religious school that becomes a reckoning with the past – would become decades later a key scene in Bad Education, is a marked story. for the speed of the dialogues and the author’s brilliant ability to describe both characters and situations in an eminently visual way. The presentation of the protagonist is exemplary in this sense: «On the street of a small Extremaduran city, a girl of about twenty-five years old attracts the attention of passers-by with her extravagant appearance. It’s mid-morning, and her clothing, already very striking, looks even more inappropriate in the sunlight. But she walks imperturbably, unaffected by the stares of the surprised pedestrians. As if she were fulfilling an old and elaborate plan, the young she moves with great confidence. Her dress, hat and other accessories are identical to those of Marlene Dietrich in The Devil is a Woman » . The specific reference to one of the films that Dietrich shot with Josef von Sternberg underlines the eminently cinematic vocation of a paragraph that could easily be translated into images and sounds.
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/el-ultimo-sueno-2
