As prolific as he is unfortunate in the most popular literary success, Hubert mingarelli he left in 2020 being the eternal promise of French literature. But of course, this gala narrative has been dominated internationally for good years by authors such as houllebecq, The master o Fred Vargas. And so things get much more difficult to stand out beyond its borders.
But someone who is a writer out of conviction does not give up the endeavor to write because basically he cannot. Starting to tell stories is a powerful vice that undermines all will as soon as the narrator takes a liking to inventing people and worlds ...
And when the moment comes, it is always a good time to make your work known, especially if you are still young to leave the scene. And if writers always have something, it is always the future, to end up dying even prostrate in front of the blank page.
I suppose that little by little we will discover more about Mingarelli. Because his works ultimately deserve it. Let's go for the moment to what has come to us in Spanish ...
Top recommended novels by Hubert Mingarelli
A meal in winter
A synthetic book in all its aspects, from its few pages to its short sentences. But nothing is coincidental in Hubert Mingarelli, everything has its explanation...
The conciseness can become unsettling when you masterfully delve into a dark narrative like this. It is not necessary to go into more detail about the worst of the human being. We have a cold and soulless scene, some armed men, a smell of death that seeps into the cold currents of the Polish winter during World War II. Executioners and victim walking together towards the summary justice of death by starvation. And not even because of that extreme coexistence can an iota of humanity flourish.
Hatred feeds them all, the three soldiers and the hunter they make pineapple with. On the other side of the focus, the Jew who must be transferred to his destination written by the final solution dictated by the Third Reich.
The story is told by one of those three soldiers trained in hatred. Accompany him Emmerich and Bauer. The three have gotten a break from their arduous task of pulling the trigger in an automated way. The sinister trio that makes up an operational group of itinerant executions (Like street vendors who arrive warned by their gunshots instead of a megaphone), goes in search and capture of new live prey for the pride of their macabre leader.
And they soon find their target. Except that the road becomes hard and they need a rest in an old cabin with a hunter who feels the same animosity towards the Jews as they do themselves.
But time passes and the harsh winter keeps them locked in the cabin, with the pangs of hunger creeping in like a pressing hallucination. And the time shared between all seems to awaken some hint of conscience linked from the particular situation of each character.
But hunger is hunger. Survival begins with the most physical sustenance. And the food must be improvised. The arrival of the hunter with his offer of alcohol with which to tame the stomach and conscience a little, increases the tension. The soldiers act against the Jews by order and command. Maybe they don't even feel any empathy. But the hunter... his simple glance at the detainee reveals the monstrosity of hatred.
Among the characters located in an extreme setting, the reader is the one who is in charge of analyzing and trying to find the reasons for each action in this preparation for an improvised meal. No invitation in the middle of a lonely place reached us with the brutal outbreak of consciousness, making us doubt whether the human being can really harbor what he can manifest in any war. Understanding also that, in that place there is no war, no trenches ..., it is only about people who haunt the hell of dehumanization encouraged by power, with the only hope of the flashes of conscience.
The invisible land
A small novel about the embers of humanity when the horrors seem defeated. A song to the melancholy of the lost souls of men and women after the war. Human beings all incapable of repairing that thousand-yard gaze that sees nothing because it is immersed in sinister indelible shadows...
In 1945, in Dinslaken, a German city occupied by the allies, an English war photographer refused to return home: while covering the last blows of the collapse of the Third Reich, he witnessed the liberation of one of the death camps. Now, unable to resume "a normal life", to even conceive that something like this could exist again after what happened, he decides to travel the country photographing people in front of their homes, thus trying to understand, to individualize the people who consented Nazi barbarism.
The colonel in command of the regiment that released the lager provides him with a vehicle and driver, a young recruit just landed on the mainland. The rest will be silence, humanity and a detailed geography of hell on earth.
