In the prose of the Peruvian Gustavo RodrÃguez, recently labeled with the Alfaguara novel award 2023, we can find a bit of everything. A Pandora's box, a catchall or even a bazaar of lost words for second-hand lovers. Existentialism from the allegorical to the alienating. Realism on which the surf of the sea (and the one that is not from the sea) leaves these remains as vestiges of life for shipwrecked people.
The point is that you always want to face the characters of Gustavo RodrÃguez. Because they are people who shake you with their direct blows, loaded with moraline for carpe diem, or those hooks under the jaw that leave you ko due to the power of their first and second aid teachings.
And surely it will not be intended by the author. Because the naturalness with which the turn of events happens, be it disaster or nirvana, shows that what this author is doing is simply letting his characters do and live. No one else is so endowed with that rabid humanity of someone who knows how to outline flesh and bone on a background of paper. The rest is always so subjective beyond the person who tells us about life, that sometimes we even reach a level between the dreamlike and the epic on the border between memories and dreams of each type that goes through these books. An experience that makes literature something more than friendly entertainment.
Top 3 recommended books by Gustavo RodrÃguez
one hundred guinea pigs
You have to know how to get the point of the tragedy of living. Letting ourselves be carried away by that biblical vale of tears ends up being a decision in the face of the inevitable. But consciousness and memory build around our time a sweet melody in which you can discover that idea that melancholy is the happiness of being sad, as he would say. The journey is short, when you are about to reach the end, the moments that happen at each moment are the immortality with which to overcome the finiteness of everything.
When Eufrasia Vela starts working as a caregiver for the elderly, she does not suspect that her trade will lead her to an existential crossroads. The intimate relationship she maintains with Doña Carmen, Dr. Harrison and The Magnificent Seven (endearing characters who take over her thoughts and affection) forces her to reconsider her role as mother and sister, the vicissitudes of longevity, the forms of compassion and the surprising value that guinea pigs, those peculiar guinea pigs, acquire in their moral budget.
Accompanied by a soundtrack where huayno, jazz, ballads and pop resound, the story of One Hundred Guinea Pigs rescues at the same time the imprint of cinema as a counterpoint to the existence of its characters and a source of revelations about the meaning of life and death when it approaches.
Dawn
The grotesque of living prevents me from making a tragedy of what has been lived and even of the future if you hurry me. There is no good coincidence but rather the relief of an onanist as an anticipation of all sorts of disasters. The thing is to approach it gracefully with a story between the delusional and the sarcastic. This is how the most intense sensations of humanity end up arriving, curiously from estrangement, despite everything, like fleeting outcomes also of experienced onanists.
Despite the fact that in 30 years of life she did not know him, Trinidad RÃos needs to find her father. She is afraid of being rejected, although fear is not unusual for her: all her life, from the early morning she was orphaned in the wild jungle of Madre de Dios, in the southern jungle of Peru, until she had to escape to the city of Lima has had to fight against women traffickers, illegal miners, sexist obstacles and an extremely racist society.
It could be said that until now she has survived successfully, but a disease caused by mercury contamination forces her to look for the only person in the world who can save her through a transplant. Will her father, a bipolar singer who makes a living imitating the Bee Gees, unaware she exists, accept her? And if he accepts her, will he be willing to give up her only dream just to save her daughter's life?
thirty kilometers at midnight
It seems you don't think so. Every warning of doom makes you think afterward that you simply acted. But the seconds or minutes that elapse from the news to the certainty pass all the covered movies of your life. What you should have done and what you will do otherwise becomes the worst. The girl who held your hand and with whom you forgot the world appears again tonight. And God knows where that person will be, but now she squeezes your hand so you don't despair or fall.
A writer and his partner attend a party on the outskirts of Lima. They both drink, eat, dance and have fun while the night slowly moves towards dawn. Suddenly, his cell phone rings. The call that no parent wants to receive: a friend of her daughter tells her that she has suffered an accident in a nightclub and she is hospitalized.
Thus begins a road trip that will mark the hectic pace of the story. Thirty kilometers at midnight that activates a second trip: the journey through the memory of a man in a state of nerves whose memories become an existential means of transport. As his car moves towards the capital, the reader enters the life of a character who is portrayed in his various facets: son, boyfriend, husband, lover, friend, father, publicist and writer, while evoking a repertoire of stories that trace the moving map of their affections.
Other recommended books by Gustavo RodrÃguez
I wrote you tomorrow
God knows what that future me would say. That you mount it without hesitation, and as soon as possible, with that little friend with whom you went for a walk for too many days; that you put the batteries and take out the bloody career; that you do more sport and that you don't smoke. Never listen to your future self. He is a frustrated, resentful and envious guy...
Manongo is a teenager from the eighties who lives the experiences and conflicts of his age: first love, the loyalty of friends, bullying, his parents' fights. In the midst of the confusion that surrounds him, strange letters begin to appear in his life, mysteriously sent from another time... written by his future self.
