In certain authors one discovers the enviable virtue of the absolute mastery of language. And that is nothing more than being able to convey new ideas, unexpected concepts, disturbing symbols or overwhelming images. Laura Moreno he does putting the words together like safe combinations, causing the miraculous final click that opens our imagination wide.
Laura Moreno He already achieves it from the title of each of his books. It is true that the poetic side of the author always helps, but maintaining her same lyrical magic in the prose is already the perpetration of deicide.
I mean works like "Almost all the scissors" "Wolf skin" or "Tempest on Friday's Eve" titles that express much more than what they say. Because surely they had never been said before, or at least not in writing and less for a book title.
Almost all scissors cut or God knows what they will do in their spare time; the wolf skin is the one that the lamb takes off after an outbreak of anger; the storm on Friday's Eve could have been a simple Thursday, but said so he would not have appeared naked in contextual lust.
And just like that, it's like an author like Lara Moreno manages to magnetize and deceive from her game with words, as if they were all hers. Selfish writer who does and undoes, composes and decomposes with her toys of mutable words in a carnival dance. Given this invitation, you only have to choose where to start. Here we go with my suggestions.
Top 3 recommended books by Lara Moreno
The city
The magic of literature makes the minuscule (within the frenetic social evolution of the big city) into the brilliant flash of the human, of the truly human, where the battles of survival and the most certain reality of existence are fought.
In a building in the La Latina neighborhood, in the center of Madrid, the lives of three women come together. The small interior apartment on the fourth floor is Oliva's house. She is trapped in a dangerous relationship that has turned the passion of the beginning into a cage. On the third floor, bright and exterior, Damaris spends her days taking care of the children of her employers. She returns to her house every night, crossing the river that socially and economically divides the city. She came to Spain looking for a better future when an earthquake in Colombia cut short her life. The same future that she was looking for Horía, the Moroccan woman who came to Huelva to work as a seasonal worker in the strawberry fields and now she lives in the tiny house at the gatehouse and cleans the stairs and patio in the shade.
This novel tells the life of the three women, their past and the siege of their present. With a beautiful and sharp voice, only the prose of Lara Moreno could thus map a territory and those who inhabit it, composing an invisible, wounded and courageous portrait of the city.
Storm on friday eve
It may be the first time that I go into a book of poetry for the critical purpose of your recommendation. More than anything because one considers himself the most profane of all those outside poetry.
But losing yourself in the work of a novelist, you unexpectedly discover that other side as well and come back to believe in the verses, an old faith lost already at the moment when you stopped writing your own atrophied youthful lyrical compositions, more or less the day after starting them.
Storm on friday eve brings together the work so far of one of the great Spanish poets of today, Lara Moreno, since her debut with The custom wound and the poems included in After apnea even those of his latest collection of poems, I had a cage, as well as several unpublished pieces, some composed during the 2020 pandemic.
The set is an impressive sample of a personal poetry, attached to the domestic and starkly visceral, in which Lara Moreno undresses with irony, tenderness and depth her intimacy, sensual and painfully disturbing, the daily reality that surrounds her and her condition as a woman . In this sense, it may not be an exaggeration to say that Lara Moreno is to poetry what Lucia Berlin is to story.
Wolf skin
Each one wears the skin that he likes best over his real skin. It is about dressing for every occasion in the social or even the most intimate. And the wolf can dress as a lamb and the lamb as a wolf. Because of everything there is in the inside of each one.
After childhood, everything is riding contradictions. Because you never remember the skin that inhabited at all times, you don't even know what you are wearing, or of course if it is the best option to match the circumstances ...
An old white and blue plastic rocking horse awaits the two sisters when they enter the home of their father, a lonely man who died a year ago, leaving behind few memories and a few coffee stains on the tablecloth. Sofía and Rita have come to town to collect what little remains of those years when they were girls and spent their summers there, in the south, near the beach.
Rita, she is so slender, so beautiful, so smart, she seems ready to dismiss the matter and get back to her business, but Sofía knows that this house will be the refuge where she and Leo, her five-year-old boy, are going to settle down to heal a heartbreak that has left her without strength. Mother and son stay there, walking that new life through the streets where the first umbrellas open, chewing rice and clean fruit, trying to imagine a future that has flavor.
And Rita? Rita leaves but comes back because there are memories that burn and resentment asks for passage. Finally, locked in that house that seemed dead, the two sisters are going to tell us a hard story, something that nobody wanted to know, a secret that perhaps it would be better to forget, and that only good literature knows how to rescue so that that pain, that anger and tenderness that suddenly appears are also ours.
Other recommended books by Lara Moreno
In case the power goes out
That first novel by the poet. That first approach with the white flag in search of parliament in the middle of the battle. Something that, on the other hand, the most treacherous poets always do, while their regiment assaults from the rear with the arsenal of all their images and tropes that explode the fortress of the novel.
They took nothing, or almost nothing; not even a taste for adventure. And when they got to town, they went into the house and lay down on a mattress as if the night was never going to end. Dawn dawned, and in the sunlight they discovered that there was more life there: a few houses, a few orchards, men and women who spoke the right thing.
Slowly, Nadia and Martín got to know Enrique, the owner of a bar where there was little more than books and stale wine, Elena and Damián, two old men made of pure stone, and Ivana, who one day appeared accompanied by a girl, daughter of all and no one.
What was the point of that trip, and those people, and that going living without images, without music, without messages to reply and only some food and sex to ease the days? Maybe it was about getting old now that there was no one left in the cities, maybe they were looking for a way of being and doing something worthy in that time that they still had before the lights went out. Who knows.
Like all great books, In case the power goes out You don't walk with answers, but with good questions. Lara Moreno is a woman who begins and has time to say her thing, but with this first novel she already gives us literature in capital letters.
