Sometimes literature feeds on itself and ends up composing scenarios halfway between reality and fiction that transform, balance and match those ultimate truths that History strives to instill by fire for the interest of one or the other. Something like this happened when Javier Fences he met Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio in Gerona back in 1994. An appointment from which that fantastic novel by Cercas was composed: Soldiers of Salamina.
Certainly, my knowledge of the writer Sánchez Ferlosio at that time was limited to readings referred to in my student days. But in the same way that Cercas was fascinated by Ferlosio's story about his father, Rafael Sánchez Mázas, founder of the Spanish Falange, then aroused my curiosity for the writer under the seal of a fatherly figure as powerful as he was. Prio Sánchez Mazas.
The best of all is that kind of synthesis of the human beyond all ideology that any writer is capable of composing. Something far above interested and labeled assumptions that others are in charge of considering before even having listened to the individual against the summary judgment of beliefs.
Sanchez FerlosioLike any other child in the world, he patiently assumed his bond, as an irrefutable physical extension for others. Unless you are a writer and are capable of counteracting everything in those minds that are capable of reading a book before composing preconceptions ...
Sánchez Ferlosio's fictional narrative was not his most extensive scope of creation either.. But both his novels and his essays are rich creations that house everything, that criticize everything, that testify to the unique interest of the writer without further conditioning: wondering the why of the world.
Top 3 recommended books by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio
The Jarama
In fictional prose, this novel stands out among its two longer sisters and the author's series of stories.
Curiously, in a creator so gifted in presenting scenarios that so magnificently represent that existence on the other side of the mirror of our reality, his dedication became increasingly oriented towards the reflection of essays and articles.
But of course, the creative imprint of each one is oriented towards expressive need, without further conditions.
The point is that in this novel of magnetic realism around a Jarama river whose waters keep pace with the evolution of a Spain in the mid-XNUMXth century, we accompany some young paradigms of that limited Spain and at the same time yearning for stolen vitalism.
A story that covers the strange hours of rest that could be linked to any other moment lived by young people in any utopian location.
The vivid mosaic of youth facing the threat of the next day, of that future that will arrive like a sledgehammer as soon as they leave that small prosaic paradise, accessible and very opportune to understand that life always seeks its channels of escape.
Industries and adventures of Alfanhuí
There were years in which writing about the real required a certain allegorical touch. And an author like Sánchez Ferlosio, interested above all in the most obvious reality, resorted to his brilliant creativity to offer us a first novel labeled picaresque and probably with total success.
Because the picaresque of the seventeenth century and the black market of the twentieth share the ingenuity towards survival and in that notion that deception can always be valid to stop deceiving the stomach, surviving characters made geniuses appear.
The protagonist of this story, Alfanhuí is half child, half man, with the ability to still see the world with illusion and magic but on the verge of that hopelessness that makes up fatigue and the fight continues.
Allegory of youth and hard times, an endearing story at times and revealing in all its reading.
Yarfoz's testimony
The last of the three novels by Sánchez Ferlosio. A novel expected at the time after the two previous great stories of the 50s.
The magical realism he flaunted is transformed in this novel into an absolute concession to the imagination that Kafka himself wishes he had written.
Because in this "testimony" balanced between erudition and fantasy we find characters loaded with symbolism. As the author himself recognized, it was a work written in brush strokes from those two novels written in the night of times of his life.
And precisely because of this well-made workmanship, the story's final load transcends even those levels of reading pleasure between ideas and imagination.
