From the test towards the novel. Maybe Edurne portela He began to trace his literary career in an atypical way, first addressing works of thought and finally displaying all his creative imprint in fiction.
But in this of literature it is not that there are fixed guidelines, in any case customs and tendencies. And if anyone can be capable of breaking stereotypes, no one better than a young author like Edurne. With an already long professional career in areas of humanistics as essential as history or philology.
Be that as it may, in the works of this Basque writer, in my opinion, there is a taste for chronicles that can always be used to tell deep-seated intra-stories or to raise that thought turned into a book and declaration of principles on any real circumstance.
So you decide to start in the work by Edurne Portela From one angle or another, you can always enjoy that most transcendental will in all literature: the most empathetic communication from thought or action.
Top 3 recommended books by Edurne Portela
Eyes closed
Very successful Edurne portela in expanding on the magical contradiction of our peoples focused on their representative Pueblo Chico. Because from each of those places where we come from, we carry with us a telluric magnetism that on our return makes us inhabit the present and the past.
That is why everything that happens and what happened is immediately ours. In principle thanks to Portela's gift of empathy made prose. But also, and in essence, because what happens and what was recorded in the memory of the old scenarios seems to return to our retina as we see it when we open our eyes again. The gleams of a time suspended between the aroma of the wood on the fire are always there.
So this novel is a comeback for everyone. A tour filled with the enigmas of characters like the young Ariadna and the old Pedro. Both inhabit the same time and space. But the two belong to very different timelines. Some lines waiting for that magical crossing that rewrites pages that had been left blank, and that are solved in a fascinating way before our wide open eyes.
The closed eyes is a novel about one place, a town that could have any name and that is why it is called Pueblo Chico. Pueblo Chico is anchored in a wild mountain range that is sometimes covered with fog, other times with snow, a mountain range in which animals sometimes get lost, people disappear. Pedro, the old protagonist of this novel, lives in the town, a repository of secrets that surround the violence that has plagued the place for decades.
When Ariadna arrives in Pueblo Chico for reasons that are unclear at first, Pedro observes and watches over her, while Ariadna reveals her own connection with the silenced history of the place. The encounter between past and present, between Pedro and Ariadna, gives rise to a novel in which Edurne Portela investigates a violence that, although it forever disrupts the lives of the characters, generates the possibility of creating a space for coexistence and solidarity.
Better absence
Relatively recently I reviewed the novel The sun of contradictionsby Eva Losada. And this book Better absence, written by another author, abounds in a similar theme, perhaps clearly disparate due to the differentiating fact of the location, of the setting.
In both cases it is about making a generational drawing, that of young people between the 80s and 90s. The common factor with any other youth, since the world is world, is that point of insolence, of rebellion against everything, of yearning for freedom (understood this at the dawn of reason).
Undoubtedly a unique cocktail for all those young and restless people who have passed through this world, and that is why these two books present that common notion, a complete temporal coincidence that identifies characters from both novels.
But the differentiating fact to which I referred before is that the youth of Better Absence are those who lived in the violent Euskadi of the 80s and 90s. What I mentioned before about insolence, rebellion and the dawn of reason was there a perfect mix to end up succumbing to that call to violence behind the shield of the ideal.
Of course, the reactionary rebels with the pretense of saviors of that particular scene, all they did was focus, orient those concerns towards violence, crime. The places where drugs moved were the best places to attract hopeless young people to inject an ideal to fight for.
Amaia spent part of her early youth observing her three older siblings. Those with whom he had recently played with were now busy destroying their lives, their families, and everything in front of them.
In the end the moments can become eternal, but the years end up passing frantically. Amaia ends up returning a long time later to her place of origin, where she lost everything and where she had to overcome everything.
But you always have to return at some point to the place where you grew up, either surrounded by complete happiness or absolutely marked. The good and the bad have to be relived at some point, to regain good feelings or to close pending issues.
Ways to be away
The experiences always serve to project new stories. Nothing better for a writer than to go out for a walk around the neighborhood or catch a flight to Timbuktu, always looking for something to have the right predisposition to tell about it.
Edurne Portela's days in the United States surely served to cradle or at least stage this story of love and subsequent disappointment. Because in the relationship between Alicia and Matty you can always detect that feeling of lost bet, of patina that pushes to flourish between the open exhibitions of the souls of Alicia and Matty.
Everything is going well between them, at that level of what it should be. But other things are always what they simply are. What the heart asks does not understand impostures or pretenses. Even less when more and more shared dreams are nightmares without resolution at dawn.
A sour story in which Alicia's very existence is that tension in the rope about to break. And only the strongest will, reborn from the rubble, can end up finding the light in a dead end tunnel.
Other recommended books by Edurne Portela…
maddi and the borders
Any fictional narrative presented in the first person places us in the eye of the hurricane of existence. As a writer the matter is quite a challenge because the focus never changes. In the case of Maddi, the plot had to be like this for a writer committed to a character like the one taken here. Because Maddi turns out to be a heroine with those traces of survival, avant-garde and daring. Listening to Maddi in her journey around the world is learning how to approach the impossible mission of reaching each one's horizon despite all the setbacks that may occur.
One autumn afternoon in 2021, Edurne Portela receives a call offering her a series of historical documents related to MarÃa Josefa Sansberro, known as Maddi, born in Oiartzun in 1895 and who ran a very popular hotel in the XNUMXs. at the foot of Mount Larrún, on the border between Spain and France.
At first glance, Maddi already reveals herself as a disturbing woman full of contradictions, who has crossed many borders, both physical and moral: smuggler and Mugalari, fervent Catholic and divorced, childless woman and mother, servant of the Nazis and agent of the Endurance. The author accepts the challenge of getting fully into those documents and, from there, imagine Maddi: her voice and her gaze, her desires and desires, her motives and reasons, her affections. This is how Maddi and the borders are written, a novel about a woman who did not conform to the conventions of her time, who crossed all the red lines, a woman who did what no one expected of her.
The echo of the shots
Weapons in the service of ideology fire even when they rest awaiting a new victim. Because that ideology loaded with reasons that can justify hatred and even murder is always a path of no return to disaster.
After ETA, the wounds remain, the strangely kind concept of putting coexistence first. And it is necessary, of course. But the echoes of the shots announced by the title of this story are heard with more force in the reverberation of souls that cannot stop moving between helplessness, guilt, the impossible forgetfulness and a feeling that something of themselves will always live in the past.
Among the author's memoirs, the present moves on that tightrope of mixed feelings. In the armistices there are always new losers, necessary for the balance that nothing gets worse. The cure, beyond the end of a conflict is only possible when everyone could consider an exercise in frank introspection.
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