I have always found such avant-garde portraiture writers like Eloy Tizon that make literature action and pause in itself; estrangement and discovery; observation and dynamic move forward. Always as plots bent on the residual truth that remains for us as an accurate outcome.
In my attempts as a writer, more prone to action, adventure, mystery or whatever moves the plot in an obvious way, I sometimes used to stop and savor particular moments of creative enlightenment. Curiously, it was not when the kernel advanced but when you recreate yourself without hardly realizing the details. In such a way that the enjoyment of that greater or lesser brush with the muses ends up being reflected in a balance between background and form, between images and meanings.
Of course, here a man is no more than an apprentice while other guys like Milan Kundera o Jose Luis Sampedro They are those virtuosos who manage to summarize in their novels movement and reflection, passion and narrative hook. An exquisite form of prodigious encounter between our reason and our imagination. Both dancing in an elegant and gigantic room surrounded by large windows, mirrors and shiny tinsel.
Perhaps too rococo but that is the notion of what the reading of Tizón sometimes gives off. And once this buried intention is discovered, it is difficult to understand literature again as something linear.
Top 3 recommended books by Eloy Tizón
Prayer for arsonists
The challenge in a volume of stories is to bind, if possible, from that ultimate meaning that gives meaning to the work. This book goes further and gives meaning from the melting pot of souls that inhabit it, as separated as they are attracted by the concentric outside of existence. To achieve this, Eloy Tizón ensures that the form contains more than the substance, that the words transmit more than the phrases, that the word games escape understanding and reach emotion without expectation.
This is how you can read this book of stories that sounds like lyrical magic, a choral composition like a world trapped in wandering scenarios that assault us from the surprise of a language full of new images.
Reading Eloy Tizón is entering the best contemporary Spanish story through the front door. With this premise, Prayer for Pyromaniacs combines like no other book by the author the discovery and epiphany of his unique and unmistakable style with the breaking of what is established in the genre and the investigation of other principles.
Nine stories intertwined by brief glimpses, by perennial absences, by daily zeal, by creative search, by the evidence of the life itself of characters who wait, of a possible memory and biography of their own and recognizable in a writing that is supplication and fire, in a literature that burns us. Life in the hands of Eloy Tizón.
Gardens speed
To break the topic a bit, it can be said that there are wines that age well over time and literary works that rejuvenate wonderfully over the years, with what condemnation it can be for their author, a modern Dorian Gray.
Because it is precisely that, images, canvases, symbols that become more and more timeless, as if gaining that condition in the durability of its plots.
Stories that link with immortality when everything is reduced to a gesture described with the perfection of the eternal; or a movement as well described as composed in musical cadence of a catchy and unforgettable rhythm.
Characters that are torn between banality and wonder constitute the pretext to raise a writing loaded with flavors and smells. There where the memory of each person invents their gardens, trades sensations, stars in shadows, since in this fast and slow book, the reader will find no other speed than the one that time impels nor the journey more difficult than the return to the desks.
labia
Everything we are, or at least what we are becoming, we incorporate from others. Our desire for knowledge, to embark on new adventures is really an intention to become others, in all those we meet. It is about learning to be how others live to escape in part from our irremediable end. Because eternity, as it is well discovered when one is faced with the most beautiful gesture that he has ever known, is that moment in which we discover someone else in someone, the most unexpected.
This is a book of voices, a polyphony of voices that tell stories through which the young protagonist will learn of the existence of a small neighborhood stationery in Madrid in the 70s, run by three “very clever” sisters, one of the which teaches calligraphy and tells a medieval story.
In addition, he will attend private drawing and painting classes taught by Professor Linaza, he will learn of the difficulties that a painter goes through in Paris, victim of a boy scout conspiracy, and of the tiny Oscar, who could not grow up. An exciting book that definitely establishes the author as one of the most personal and suggestive voices in current narrative.
Other recommended books by Eloy Tizón
Lighting Techniques
The juiciest volumes of stories are those whose nexus arises tangentially. From the invisible detail at first glance, under the barely appreciable touch of the most sibylline coincidence but that ultimately moves everything in life.
What really happened at the party held last night? Was there a victim? What does the box contain that our boss secretly gives us, asking us not to open it, and inside which is detected an agitation, a minimum cry? Will it be a living being or a clockwork mechanism? Who is ?? that other person that we are not interested in ??, who usually appears in relationships almost always attached to the loved one and from whom it is impossible to get rid? What kind of apocalypse does that family flee from the city with their clothes on and end up wandering lost in the forest?
In all these stories there is a reverse of shadow, a vertex of silence, something that is not named directly but that is an invitation to the reader to immerse himself and participate in the construction of meaning.
So that you intervene in the strange normality of these ten dreams, and you can find a bit of clarity or a pen against misery. Pages that shine with their own light. Lighting techniques.
