Not all authors achieve the immortality of their work. The Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro knows about this approval from readers from half the world. In his imagination, so many times boasting of concision, of wonderful brevity comparable to Borges o Cortázar, we find ingenuity like manna divided into enough pieces to feed souls yearning for discovery.
Between the aphorism, the story and the novel, Ribeyro developed a work with moments of unleashed lucidity, of an inexplicable magnetism like that of a scent that takes you back to childhood or an echo that remembers your song. The point is to discover it today as a placebo against creative effervescences that simply seek narrative tension as absolute justification. As always, this is not about open criticism but about necessary compensation to maintain literature as an art capable of housing everything, the superficial and the deep.
Top 3 recommended books by Julio Ramón Ribeyro
The word of the mute
Without a doubt a word finally made loquacious. Because once his voice has been recovered, the mute, or rather the mute, has many things to say. Hasty ideas that assail us with the intensity of the story where a new world is completely built that finally ends up being erased in its outline or burning in a redemptive or infernal fire...
The Word of the Mute, composed of almost a hundred stories, is responsible for giving voice to those characters who are deprived of it in everyday life: the marginalized, the forgotten, those condemned to a hidden existence. Ribeyro's short story production transmits the desires, outbursts and anxieties of its protagonists through clean prose and a style far from artifice,
offering one of the greatest examples of short fiction in the Western world.
The temptation of failure
It is always a privilege to access those notes that accompany the author as a diary. In this case, surely made up for the occasion, perfected to compose the juiciest of stories, that of the author himself giving shape to reality, destructuring it, focusing on the anecdotal that ends up being a trigger.
Because the senses of the writer about to address his new story bring us closer to realities much more interesting than the mediocre impressions and subjective notions of those of us who simply inhabit for the sake of inhabiting, at least in some moments of our lives...
Since the late XNUMXs, the great Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro was creating a personal diary that accompanied him during multiple trips and stays in Spain, France, Germany, Belgium and Peru. A colossal work, originally not intended for publication, is projected as one of the most intense and moving testimonies of the vital and creative itinerary of a writer.
stateless prose
The idea is so true... There is no homeland for the feeling or the story. Stripped of artifice as great as the border, humans are exposed to what is only through literature or any other form of art. Naked reason to face each idea, concept, phrase... Discovering what our passing and stepping through this world can be like from the closest land to the most distant, icy and disturbing permafrost.
Between the aphorism, the philosophical essay and the diary, Prosas apátridas is a work of singular strength. Each entry is a succulent morsel of wisdom on topics as diverse as literature, memory and oblivion, old age and childhood, or love and sex.
Julio Ramón Ribeyro explores new ways of representing a reality that is perceived as irremediably fragmented. His style, elegant and precise, and his irony and bitter lucidity give unity to these pages that capture the condition of modern man in all its depth.
Stateless Prosas contains, in Ribeyro's own words, texts "without a 'literary homeland'... no genre wanted to take charge of them... It was then when it occurred to me to bring them together and provide them with a common space, where they could feel accompanied and free themselves from the burden of loneliness". The reader has in their hands the spiritual testimony of one of the great authors of Hispanic literature of the XNUMXth century.
