The 3 best books by Kiko Amat

The best creative generation is that in which each one does what comes out of it, finally ceasing to be a generation in the unifying sense of the term. Then the Mercadona labellers arrive with their stamping machine (let's call them literary critics) and are in charge of uniting to look for generational tunes under study.

In those walks a Kiko ama, of the supposed nocilla generation that is connected in turn with afterpop or newpunk (perhaps I am inventing something). The point is that Amat is as imaginative in his works as he appears in his interviews, which is what is important after all.

Be that as it may, Amat cannot be denied that avant-garde point that always awakens transgressive sensations in the forms, but that maintains the essence of a narrative focused on the mission of telling something that reaches.

A storytelling task that involves a magical weaving of that empathy that makes us connect with the characters. Whether to live a disruptive adventure with a dystopian, hilarious, fantastic but very close touch or to delve into transformative reflections. A sublimation of realism executed with alchemical arts.

Top 3 recommended novels by Kiko Amat

Before the hurricane

The consequences of being weird, the border between genius and madness or between eccentricity and freakism. The tormented final reality that had already been announced by the lightning bolts of madness.

Before the Hurricane tells us the story of Curro, currently admitted to a psychiatric center but with the firm determination to take back the reins of his life. Under the new and spectral lucidity that finally governs the spirit of work, flight is the only solution to return to whatever his destiny was.

And while Curro plots his escape, to the breath of his most imaginative and delusional creations, we begin to discover who Curro really was.

We go back more than 30 years to the year of Naranjito and his soccer World Cup in Spain. We get to know the bizarre home that housed him during the first years of his life, a humble home about to be swallowed up by the outskirts of a Barcelona insatiable of new space.

Curro had a best friend, Priu, in whose relationship any of us can reflect ourselves, with that nostalgic touch of childhood, of the world to discover. Curro's oddities, accompanied by the no less peculiar Priu, are sympathetic, the singular flash of oddities also identify us against the mania of normality ...

But we know that Curro, and his world, is geared toward catastrophe. Perhaps in other circumstances poor Curro could have gotten ahead, more or less, despite being seen as a strange bug by his fellow men ... However, Curro's family nucleus is precisely that, a nucleus about to explode definitively.

Thus, from the humorous brushstrokes of childhood, from the soft sadness that neighborhood life sometimes gives off, we quickly pass to the contrast of fatality. Curro is too young, barely twelve years old, to assume such a tragically marked destiny, but it is what it is ...

A point of bitter resignation emerges in the plot. And in the eighties setting itself that still offers us a decadent glimpse of a society that seems to be looming into the future without having them all with it.

Opportunities on the outskirts of any city are drastically reduced. The chances of the insecure Curro in the middle of his family's hurricane are 0 absolute.

The grotesque family of Curro at times wakes us up an acid smile, with that disturbing shadow of black humor that ends up striking a chord when empathy is achieved, the real suffering of the character.

The hurricane ends up being generated, what today is called perfect cyclogenesis is closing in around Curro. And, despite reading with a point of hope, the strange thing is that something else had happened. Because ... if we go back to the beginning, today's Curro remains hospitalized, planning a grotesque escape.

Before the hurricane

Things that go boom

As soon as Pànic made an effort, he could become that Holden Caulfield who puzzles us all in "The Catcher in the Rye" of salinger. But Pànic is more about hanging around the house with its youthful oddities. That is precisely why we end up hating Holden or at least taking a bit of mania and Pànic is that nice extravagant capable of anything.

The most obsessive obsession, for everything, is the problem of Pànic Orfila, an Anglo-Catalan orphan teenager who is left in charge of his great-aunt Àngels in Sant Boi, a town on the outskirts of Barcelona. Àngels, a member of the Institute of Public Vandalism, is the only fixed satellite that orbits the delusional mind of Pànic, around which several obsessions also revolve: surrealism, Satanism, the situationists, Max Stirner, soul music, masturbation and Eleonor, a girl from her high school.

At the age of twenty, Pànic left for Barcelona. He tries to study Romance Philology and meets Rebeca, with whom he falls in love. But he also joins the Vorticistas: a strange gang of revolutionary dandies from the Gràcia neighborhood who have a menacing secret plan.

Pànic desperately tries to keep Rebecca, while the Vorticists push him into chaos riding between amphetamine and dynamite.

Things that go boom

You are the best, Cienfuegos

There was a day when the stereotype of the marginal opened up to a multitude of new inhabitants of this comfortable world. Because a stroke of bad luck, plus a bit of crisis, added to the shift in the economic paradigm that seeks to devastate the middle class, can disrupt everything. Smiling openly at tragedy is an act of inertia in the face of the surprise of finding yourself where you never imagined.

Cienfuegos was called to greatness, but greatness passed by. It's November 2011 in Barcelona, ​​and as the country plunges into an unprecedented crisis, Cienfuegos has another crisis to deal with: its own.

His wife, Eloísa, has just kicked him out of the house, and now she is dating a new boyfriend. Her three-year-old son, Curtis, remains in maternal custody, and Cienfuegos prowls under the former family balcony every night at three, while EREs multiply in the offices of the newspaper for which he works.

Everything seems to improve when he comes across Defense Interior, an industrial music duo. But it will not be that easy, and Cienfuegos will soon see that the road to redemption is uphill. As funny and hilarious as it is moving and unpredictable, it is a tragicomedy about the crisis of the forties, grief, guilt, fatherhood and the possibility of pardon built with sad humor and unstoppable rhythm, as well as an emotional moral fable drawn on the landscape. from 15M.

You are the best, Cienfuegos
5/5 - (13 votes)

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