It is what has the vocation to tell what happens and to chronicle social events of any kind. In the end every journalist like Pedro Simon he is a potential storyteller. Because fiction is separated from reality in the profusion of details, in the search for reasons more than ever in the face of a reality that increasingly passes at breakneck speed without detail or possibility of analysis.
And curiously, they are the ones who send us the information, who are forced to vomit the events at dizzying speed, who in the end find peace and rest in the novel, the one that would be needed to analyze the facts as in the past towards journalism, before that the enemy of the networks and the transience of interest lurked like a bad monster. Cases like those of Carlos of Love, Carme Chaparro, Monica Carrillo…. Until arriving at Don Pedro Simón with his brand new Spring Novel Award 2021. All of them testify to it ...
The opportunity is painted bald and if Simón's literary vocation already pointed to a certain persistence, the sure recognition that pushes him to investigate more in fiction and its possibilities to make up, transform and make life the story that most wants to be told, the one that carefully analyzes wills, movements, mysteries, guilt and all that of the human lost in messages of maximum 140 characters ...
Top 3 recommended books by Pedro Simón
Landslide Hazard
The journalistic vein means that in many of the novels written by a vocational journalist, this interest in the composition of events is extracted from the intrahistorical, from stories like puzzle pieces that finally only reveal their reality in the distance, once You have left yourself before your eyes in the assembly of pieces…
An infamous job offer, a maddening waiting room, a Human Resources director devoted to sadism and entomology, and nine desperate job seekers with the stubbornness of an insect. That is the starting point of Danger of collapse, a multifaceted novel in which the author draws a stark etching of the crisis, the epic (if possible) of tangled and broken lives, like the branches of a tree rotten by woodworm and that should be cut down.
The mother who sells her watch and also her most intimate time. The university student who cannot find a job or reasons to keep looking. The insomniac who committed treason. The cleaning worker who is ashamed of her smell. The businessman who used to be scary and is now scary. The formwork that hides its hands… In this waiting room, everyone travels in the same boat. They all do it without a compass. And they're all heading for the same cliff
Memories of Alzheimer's
This is not a rigorous analysis, but the coincidence of this loss of memory in cases of people of social relevance who perhaps lost many hours of sleep along the way is curious. And it is that the gray matter will also have its hours of maximum performance, its obsolescence planned by God or by the manufacturer that is, failing that. It is also true that it is a very common disease and that every neighbor's child exercises the brain to the point of exhaustion marked by the liberating entry into sleep. And in the end everything seems to point to that, to the dream where reason is swayed for better or for worse ...
Adolfo Suárez, Jordi Solé Tura, Pasqual Maragall, Eduardo Chillida, Enrique Fuentes Quintana, Antonio Mercero, Mary Carrillo, Carmen Conde, Elena Borbón Barucci, Antonio Puchades, Tomás Zori, Leonor Hernández. Alzheimer's is the bag of ice that Pasqual Maragall didn't know where to keep. The fried egg that made Mary Carrillo laugh. "La Internacional" that didn't sound familiar to Jordi Solé Tura. The nurse whom Eduardo Chillida confused with Dulcinea. The "who is Mariam" by Adolfo Suárez.
The Istanbul of Tomás Zori. Leo Hernández's chainsaw. Around the world by Navalmoral de Béjar by Carlos Boyero's aunt. The offside of the soccer player Antonio Puchades. The silence of Enrique Fuentes Quintana. The Paris of Elena de Borbón Barucci. Carmen Conde's blue tracksuit. Singing in the rain three times a day by Antonio Mercero ...
Memories of Alzheimer's is the result of a year of conversations with the most intimate surroundings of a handful of illustrious patients, well-known caregivers and voids that filled everything. Memories of Alzheimer's cannot be eaten, but its lines are worth it as a pharmacopoeia against an illness without a cure, a disease that has 800.000 Spaniards rocking in the amniotic fluid of oblivion and countless relatives clinging to a photo album.
Barbarian chronicles
Pedro Simón would not even remotely glimpse the Primavera de novela 2021 prize looming on the horizon for him. And there was the journalist, on the verge of being exalted in literature, rather writing books of suggestive journalism, of survivors between reality and fiction. That kind of reports taken from the wild side that Lou Reed sang to ...
Pedro Simón brings together in this book reports where the common thread is compassion, the open wound, human journalism. A 73-year-old junkie, the man who died live, the widow who met her husband's murderer and other stories of a Spain where you eat or are eaten. Because there are pains that cannot be counted in words. And they need a whole book.
Other recommended books by Pedro Simón
The misunderstood
Javier and Celia are a middle class couple with a young son and a pre-teen daughter. He works in a publishing house and she in a hospital; he fixes fake lives and she fixes real lives. They try to prosper, they move to a better neighborhood, everyday life. It could be the story of many. Until an excursion to the Pyrenees takes place that changes absolutely everything.
This is the story of a trip to the abyss that speaks of many other trips. The journey from childhood to convulsive adolescence. The one that goes from childish hubbub to the deadliest silence. The one of the parents who walk behind with their guilt and arrive late. That of the grandparents who went before and to whom nobody listens. The one someone does to save a life. It is also the story of that other journey that we are all afraid of: the one that speaks of our darkest and most secret past.
Los misunderstood is a novel about family loneliness, the lack of communication between parents and children, the horror of saying, but also, and from the first page, about hope.
