El Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique He is an incomparable narrator, an explorer of the will of the human being, of the reasons for existence, a mirror in which every reader can end up finding his or her reflection. WhyBryce Echenique's fundamental argument, which runs like a light veil through all of his books, is loneliness, in each and every one of its many possibilities.
Loneliness can be recollection and reflection, or it can become the review of secrets, regrets and guilt, it can even end up turning into prayers. Loneliness can even be used simply in selective memory entertainments for routine avatars that cover what really matters.
And both reading and writing is an act of faith in solitude as a parenthesis for yourself, where you can fire your imagination and transform yourself into the intense characters in detail outlined from within thanks to the portentous pen of this author.
Top 3 recommended novels by Alfredo Bryce Echenique
Prisoner of nocturnal
At what point is love opportunism? Who takes advantage of whom, Max or Ornella? Apparently it is Ornella who in her itineraries from Max's life to other lives and back again to Max is the one who takes advantage, who parasitizes Max's soul for the benefit of his company and his shoulder ready for his tears.
But on the other hand it could be Max, who knows himself defeated by life who takes advantage of Ornella, who brings him at least some drop of the past aroma of life. Everything else is insomnia for Max.
His fear of the night is really the panic of his conscience bent on recriminating his most futile existence. Be that as it may, in the end Ornella ends up disappearing and all that is new are shadows, extensions of an insomnia that prevents her from having a natural rest with which to take a more joyful look at life.
Among all those who remain, including some fleeting new love, no one will know how to accompany their lonely hours.
The garden of my beloved
Love, when it is played inside that random roulette that ends up uniting a mature woman and a young boy, always has a strange point between maternal and libidinous.
Then a kind of idea of ​​tender sex arises and that, such a plane of equality or even inferiority of men with respect to women once horizontally, is not always to the liking of the most retrograde and patriarchal consciences.
But Carlitos is in love with Natalia and the rest matters little to them, or even if they do, he can never overcome his passion. Both are wealthy people from the city of Lima in the 50s and both escape moral impositions on both sides, that of unconsciousness and that of self-sufficiency.
Between the two there is that typical social outbreak that repudiates the minimally different, the discordant as threatening ... The best of all is that the author dwells more on the moral miseries of those who accuse and extol more if possible the carnal and moral glories of that shameless love that revitalizes one and awakens the other to life.
Tarzan's tonsillitis
Yes, good old Bryce Echenique also joined the current of headline some of his novels in a disconcerting way. And yet the important thing, beyond a title that can serve for the first visual impact and the profusion of interpretations, is the substance of the background.
This is a good novel in which Tarzan is only a wink, an anecdote between the two characters, a joke of those that can end up becoming a key of love encrypted on both sides of the lovers.
Because this story is a love story. Remoteness is oblivion to the extent that one surrenders to it as an excuse to forget, nothing more. Only an "acrobat love" is capable of moving through the years from a first meeting in Rome in 1963 to more than thirty years later.
In the meantime some body to body, moreover, letters, confessions, stories and experiences around the transit of his strange love and the Latin American world.
The voice of Fernanda, the female lover of course, takes over the entire novel, sprinkling it with her impressions and her open confessions about her way of seeing the world, a world that, according to her spirit, is too small for her.
Other recommended books by Alfredo Bryce Echenique…
The exaggerated life of MartÃn Romaña
Under the influence of Hemingway, MartÃn Romaña leaves Peru for Paris, but nothing there is like in the North American's books. MartÃn comes across a world plagued by concierges and perverse dogs, marries a militant of the extreme left and tries, without much luck, to become a model revolutionary, while with humor he writes his novel about the Latin Americans who survive in «a Light to which the leads have been melted».
