Finds: Esteban Mayorga
After taking a good look at the shelf where he keeps his most cherished books, albums and movies, this is what Ecuadorian writer Esteban Mayorga decided to share with us.
Neighbors (1980). Thomas Berger
A couple moves to the suburbs and falls out with the neighbors and then suddenly, though masterfully paced, several instances of adult mischief transpire and escalate and escalate and escalate, at a quick clip, moving from fistfights to kidnapping to insults to armed robbery, building to an impressive tension that brings about real possibilities of death, game-playing, power, and hatred at the hands of the neighborhood.
Sad and comic situations ensue, always with unexpected twists in extremely small spaces made up of two, three rooms, a car, a patio. Some of these situations are nearly but not entirely absurd, rather very particular and relevant to American culture, because the author’s prose is concise enough to make you tremble, in the same way that his eye for detail makes you tremble.
Neighbors is an exercise in the impossible nature of political correctness and civility, but it’s also the purest, most personal risk that results from a text made up by the excess material found in American family novels (Cfr. The Corrections). In turn it portrays, as it cauterizes, the very gringo and ineffectual attitude that avoids and dodges confrontation to the point of the most irrefutable and assumed stupidity; everything gets out of hand, what’s real doesn’t exist, everything ends by exploding.
Finds:
[Juan Álvarez: Pueblo alimaña]
[Diego Erlan: Últimos días de Sexton y Blake]
[Rodrigo Blanco Calderón: Maten al león]
[Ricardo Silva Romero: Girls]
[Betina González: Sweet Days of Discipline]
Neighbors (1980). Thomas Berger
A couple moves to the suburbs and falls out with the neighbors and then suddenly, though masterfully paced, several instances of adult mischief transpire and escalate and escalate and escalate, at a quick clip, moving from fistfights to kidnapping to insults to armed robbery, building to an impressive tension that brings about real possibilities of death, game-playing, power, and hatred at the hands of the neighborhood.
Sad and comic situations ensue, always with unexpected twists in extremely small spaces made up of two, three rooms, a car, a patio. Some of these situations are nearly but not entirely absurd, rather very particular and relevant to American culture, because the author’s prose is concise enough to make you tremble, in the same way that his eye for detail makes you tremble.
Neighbors is an exercise in the impossible nature of political correctness and civility, but it’s also the purest, most personal risk that results from a text made up by the excess material found in American family novels (Cfr. The Corrections). In turn it portrays, as it cauterizes, the very gringo and ineffectual attitude that avoids and dodges confrontation to the point of the most irrefutable and assumed stupidity; everything gets out of hand, what’s real doesn’t exist, everything ends by exploding.
Finds:
[Juan Álvarez: Pueblo alimaña]
[Diego Erlan: Últimos días de Sexton y Blake]
[Rodrigo Blanco Calderón: Maten al león]
[Ricardo Silva Romero: Girls]
[Betina González: Sweet Days of Discipline]
