Current Peruvian literature finds in Santiago Roncagliolo an important storyteller who is already knocking on the doors of Bryce echenique o Vargas Llosa as the possible replacement of that stereotype of a veteran writer, hardened in dozens of novels and essays and boosted in general recognition. Time to time.
Because continuity in the Roncagliolo's literary career It is manifested not only in his already great novels, but also in his versatility, capable of exploiting it in children's books, plays or composing film scripts.
A total writer who in his novelistic facet demonstrates that excellence that rounds off any genre he plays.. Because it is not the same to write a crime novel (by focusing on a genre addressed by the author) frenetic of action and tension, than to end up rounding it with nuances only available to the virtuous narrator. A special narrator like Santiago who brings existentialist sparkles or who adorns the soul of the characters far beyond a simple psychological outlining.
All this, curling the curl even more with the exquisiteness typical of someone who handles the language with that gift of metaphor, of trope, of ingenuity at the service of musicality or transcendence from simple form.
Top 3 recommended novels by Santiago Roncagliolo
The night of the pins
From the strange space of the consequences of our actions, this story breaks in. Although it does not explore new territories, it does open us to more intense visions.
Youth and its incontestable physical and emotional plenitude. The one in which everything must be faced with the vigor of the unique, the exceptional. From there the trails of blood or tears can begin to spread to the consequences. Even though things come as they come. Although circumstances converge and conspire. Guilt always remains when you end up deciding to face the simple fact of being in the worst time and place.
Beto, Moco, Carlos and Manu shared friendship and the awakening of sexuality in a Jesuit college in Lima. But also something else: during their adolescence they fought to hide their weakness from their peers, mark their territory and flee from their respective family realities. A cocktail that led them to decide that only by exercising power over others with irrational fury could they be able to leave a definitive mark on their existence.
From adulthood and with a frankness that only the passage of time can give, the four recall a dramatic event lived in those years of which only they know the truth.
What actually happened the night they decided to rebel against their entire world? In a turbulent time in the history of Peru, during the nineties, what began as an adventure charged with revenge slips from their hands and finds its perfect echo in the attacks and bombings that take place in the country: the general horror competes with the particular. And not even love can redeem.
The night of the pins, a story of violence starring young people who, oblivious to any sense of danger, break every barrier between good and evil, confirms the talent of Santiago Roncagliolo in handling thriller and suspense, and his privileged place in Spanish literature.
Red april
As in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, certain environments are always breathed with that smell of death to come, of an insurmountable destiny. And the bravest guy may end up discovering that you are what you are only as long as life doesn't overwhelm you.
Investigating a crime can take you a long way. Until hell ...
«I always wanted to write a thrillerthat is, a bloody cop with serial killers and monstrous crimes. And I found the necessary elements in the history of my country: a war zone, a celebration of death like Holy Week, a city populated by ghosts. Can you ask for more?
“The investigator of the murders is the deputy district attorney Félix Chacaltana Saldívar. He likes to be called that, with his title and all. Prosecutor Chacaltana has never done anything wrong, he has never done anything good, he has never done anything that was not clearly stipulated in the regulations of his institution.
But now he is going to know the horror. And the horror has not read the civil code. I always wanted to write a novel about what happens when death becomes the only way of life. And here it is.
Pudor
Taken to the cinema for its lyrical force, perhaps in tune with La casa de los espíritus. A short novel as if suspended in the time of its characters, a plot that advances from the spiritual, from what must remain when we are reduced to memories and dust.
The short chapters accompany that almost conceptual becoming, that action transmitted like an electric current between its characters exposed to tragedy and an assumption of the worst capable of awakening a comic point as well.
«This is a novel about intimacy, about the desires and fears that we do not confess even to those we love the most, about the secrets with which we protect ourselves so that others do not harm us.
His characters are a man who is going to die, a woman who receives pornographic anonymous names, a child who sees corpses, a cat who wants sex, those kinds of people. Like many families, all these characters live together and they are all alone.
Sometimes it seems like a very sad and sordid story to me, and sometimes I think it is a comedy. It is what families and feelings have in common, that they never agree. "
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