Arriving stomping is a great guarantee of success. In the field of literature, achieving that triumphal entry is even more difficult than in any other field. You have to have talent, but also patience and a point of perfectionism. That talent that he does have Bethlehem Gopegui, cradled with the indicated doses of patience and perfectionism, led to his first novel as his first great success.
It was about the novel The scale of the maps. And since then this author has been releasing her new books almost every three years (hint about the methodical nature of the author's creative process?). Or perhaps it is a matter of that compatibility of the narrative with the script for various films ...
The point is that as far as the novel is concerned, Belén came out on stage with a captivating personality deployed on a current narrative proposal that addresses many different social aspects. Characters of great depth between plots that lead us through very lively and disparate stories, in that melted melting pot where Belén manages to write magnetic stories full of captivating personal stories or with a point of sociological analysis or even with certain generational essay readings.
For all this, Belén Gopegui is valued as a new and powerful voice of current narrative, a cultivated writer capable of mastering, not abusing, all her great cultural baggage at the service of the imagination.
Top 3 best novels of Belén Gopegui
We would exist the sea
Common life in a city is sometimes marked by circumstances and necessity. In the fascinating circles of life's contingencies, unique spaces are created where the human takes on an unexpected dimension. A great story about what is built around a life given over to eventuality.
At the portal 26 of Calle Martín Vargas in Madrid, Lena, Hugo, Ramiro, Camelia and Jara have managed to turn the apartment they share into a common living space. At forty they live together out of necessity and because it is part of their way of understanding coexistence and personal relationships. But Jara's situation and character are more unstable: she hasn't had a job for a long time and she always lives in suspense. Is that why he left without warning and without leaving a note of his whereabouts?
We would exist the sea it is a breath of energy that leads us to the paths where fragility and strength meet, the difficult and the possible, new beginnings, and different forms of perseverance and loyalty. Belén Gopegui has written a daring and moving novel of common stories where the most intense thing does not reside neither in the darkest nor in the most murky, but, sometimes, many times, in moments of respect, laughter, talk, happiness, mutual support or shared anger.
The scale of the maps
The new voices, when they begin to sound with such force, transform that first work into a masterful opera prima, a label by which it could be thought that the summit has just begun the journey ..., but in literature as in any creative field always there is room to surprise in each new idea. Starting out writing about love is a declaration of intent at the height of the quote "let's face it ... let's ask for the impossible."
Love as what it is inside its characters and the abysmal distance from reality. In fact, if reality is always subjective, under the prism of love it becomes dreamlike.
About love that is not reciprocated, about intellectualized love, about love as the only motor and yet…, about love as our greatest weakness. In this first novel, Belén Gopegui practiced a novel surgery in the forms and the substance.
His characters are arranged on the stretcher and they are dissected with cuts drawn from within, to be participants in how to think and how to love from the reflection of other eyes in our consciences.
Stay this day and tonight with me
Reality must always be a synthesis. The subjective world, our reality, is best outlined based on the meeting of two very different visions, capable of opening the range to the maximum to locate an intermediate point.
Mateo is a young, pretentious and vital. Olga is an adult woman who spends her retirement time studying this reality composed of mathematics, statistics, probabilities and formulas where she can find certainty beyond subjective limitations. The network supports both options.
It is the current Universe for all kinds of searches, from a blender to the encounter with oneself. And of course love. Love can be found in any search engine. The idea is that the algorithm ends up hitting the cookies that leave our trace.
Olga would never have thought that there might be an encounter between her world and Mateo's. In the same way that Mateo would not have thought that he had anything in common with Olga. But searches in general have the same background: knowing and knowing.
When two souls share the same tendency to knowledge and wisdom, perhaps they are not so far away in the mathematical arc of love, in the statistical probability that ends up becoming the deviation of the case studied.
It is then when the synthesis, the generational encounter and the takeoff of something special can come, led by an almost poetic prose, with the edges of the most torn poems, with its sweetness and its bitterness. This review may sound like a romance novel to you, and part of it is.
But we must not forget that Belén Gopegui's pen presents features that are difficult to classify, a tragic, existential tone, bathed in an overwhelming vitalism and a disturbing background that only great writers manage to convey.
Other recommended books by Belén Gopegui…
Snow white's father
Without a doubt a suggestive title for a story that, although surprising, does not disappoint. But of course, what is not surprising about Belén Gopegui? Starting from a painful circumstance in which a delivery employee blames a client for dismissing her, promoted based on her complaints, we delve into very diverse issues.
From the unhealthy obsession of the delivery man, determined that she is the one who gets him a new job, and that will change the entire life of the bewildered teacher, we are faced with aspects of our current society such as privacy, fragility, and the particular notion of indifference of an entire society stubborn in denying any common space for improvement.
