Recognized with several of the most prestigious Spanish literary awards, Antonio Soler discovered himself as a writer with that mixture of surprise, devotion, excitement and uncertainty of someone who, even at a tender age, finds himself sitting exorcising stories while the world seems to move at a different pace. .
That was the young Antonio Soler forging his future as a writer. But he was also the Antonio Soler whom everyone would see out of place, outdated in his literary endeavor. Something like this can be deduced from an interview in which this author goes back to his beginnings in front of the blank page.
Today Soler is an essential pen; a reference for any writer; a versatile storyteller who as soon as he publishes authentic chronicles transmuted into historical fictions, as it surprises us with intense plots of powerful realism.
A writer always Surprising and exciting that beyond his novel «The way of the English«, popularized to a greater extent by the Antonio Banderas movie, has many other novels to enjoy from its brilliant bibliography.
Top 3 recommended novels by Antonio Soler
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At dawn on a torrid day in August 2016, in one of the wastelands of the city of Malaga, the body of a dying man appears covered in ants.
This marginal fact of the chronicle of events gives rise to the narration of the day of a city and its motley reality: policemen and criminals, adolescents and pensioners, priests and traveling musicians, doctors and reporters, writers and murderers, drug addicts and street vendors, mystics and survivors, waiters and builders, dead and alive.
In the great tradition of novels that occur in a single day, such as James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway or Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano; and of the novels that focus on the development of the life of a city, such as Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos, Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin or Petersburgo by Andrey Biely, this new novel by Antonio Soler is undoubtedly his most ambitious work. only a novelist with his experience could undertake.
The variety of characters, situations, linguistic registers, narrative techniques, make Sur a dazzling and fascinatingly rich novel in which are all the stories that boil in a city, oscillating every day between hell, salvation or insignificance. .
The dead dancers
Ramón came from southern Spain to one of the most emblematic cabarets of Barcelona in the sixties to pursue a career as a singer. In postcards, letters and photographs that he periodically sends to his family, he communicates his achievements and some failures, the discovery of the big city and the sordid and fascinating world of his colleagues.
Ramón's postcards and successes fill parents with pride. And they immerse their younger brother in a dream world of artists, musicians, magicians and dancers who dazzle the adolescent from afar as he struggles to leave behind the irretrievable world of childhood.
When the dancers begin to fall dead on stage during the performance, the adolescent narrator will discover that the world of adults can be even harsher than the difficult passage from childhood to youth, where every look that girls deny hurts, and where games often end in fights.
With The Dead Dancers - Herralde Prize and National Critics Prize - Antonio Soler has written a masterful novel of initiation to life, with an extreme sensitivity for the beautiful and the dark, for what shocks and what moves.
A violent history
Every ending of the human is the violent, tragically disruptive act of death. That is a defeat that marks since we are born and that is gaining parcels of consciousness as we grow. Making literature about it is a brave declaration of intent to warn us that we stay with the best among the violent sensation that governs everything.
The protagonist of A violent history he is an amazed child. Life unfolds around him, a play of which he is a part and whose meaning he strives to understand. A microcosm of uncontrolled drives, desires, larvated sexuality, power.
With an effective prose and sustained in the brevity, we are shown how the protagonists are discovering a world where equality does not exist and privileges come with the cradle, where violence is often free and the defeated are forever, where all Revolt is crushed by "things as they are" and the last flash of reality is given by the discovery of death.
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