Buenos, limpios y lindos

A con man on the run in Ipanema seeks a triumphant return to his country by conning his life, or a few lives; father and son, immigrants, ride the New York subway like someone traveling to another dimension; a Salvadoran poet enlists to join the guerilla while dreaming a terrible premonition; a Spanish publisher hunting for the new star of South American literature among the domestic staff and the bricklayers of recent migration; two friends celebrate an unlikely meeting while in the other corner of the fiction they see their lives entangled around a mad German philosopher; a shaman tells his disciple about his relationship with Che Guevara; death breaks into a party of exiles. Exiles, emigrants, fugitives of various species: stories of displaced beings, displaced lives in search of a center that eludes them but which they cannot afford to renounce.

In Abecedario del estío, Liliana Lara uses the letters of the alphabet as a starting point for the stories that make up this volume. Situations and musings that straddle between fiction and reminiscence are the main elements that feed each of these. Images tattooed in the memory such as the pool water in which his son almost drowned, the violent awakening after the bombings in the second war between Israel and Lebanon, the memory of the terminals and bus trips in Venezuela, the delights of kosher and non-kosher food. Very short stories that can become delicious anecdotes to read and food for reflection and exploration of the satisfactions and fears of the emigrant who faces cultural duality.

En el Miami de 1958, un grupo de jóvenes cubanos se reúne por las noches en un chalet a conspirar un golpe para derrocar a Fulgencio Batista y así recuperar la Cuba que había sido depositada en manos de los “gringos”. En ese mismo chalet, ubicado en la Pequeña Habana del Miami contemporáneo, el Comanche, el ex inspector privado que mejor conoce los bajos fondos de la ciudad, busca desenmascarar una mafia de empresarios de telemarketing que a ojos de terceros son unos prósperos negociantes, pero que lo único que realmente les interesa es estafar a sus clientes y vendedores. ¿Qué conexión existe entre ese Miami de 1958, pequeño pueblo anglo de pocos habitantes, y la gran urbe cosmopolita y vertiginosa de ahora? El máximo representante del Noir Tropical en español, Pedro Medina León, regresa con una nueva aventura del Comanche, para mostrarnos la crudeza de una metrópolis que se vende como refugio y capital de Latinoamérica, pero en la que el peor enemigo de un latino es otro latino.

Through the friction between silence and memory, this Venezuelan author builds a universe in which she touches every fiber of its inhabitants. In Ana does not sleep and other stories, narrative eloquence is mixed with poetic metaphor to offer us a text that weaves through nostalgia and the desires of its characters. The feeling becomes the foundation of each story, while the reader is carried away forgetting how treacherous memory can be.

From each of the Serious Murderer stories comes a small universe of beings imprisoned in bizarre or absurd circumstances to which they lead the life they lead badly in the place they inhabit. A model is invented to avoid erection, a crazy story involving one of the trainees being drawn by some students; a knife vendor at home discovers that an old woman buys his merchandise and those of other vendors to avoid loneliness; an immigrant who doesn’t understand his wife’s obsession with a crippled dog; a man whose impossible friendship between himself and a clitoris brings him only misfortune. Masterfully combining a sense of humor and emotional depth, the stories of Francisco García González are like valuable and strange objects that, without ever losing the thread or coherence, change and transform in front of the astonished reader.

Miami se consolidó como la capital mundial del crimen en los años ochenta, y en The Mutiny, un hotel boutique en Coconut Grove, se fraguaron muchos de los delitos que la llevaron a esto. Punto de encuentro de narcotraficantes, traficantes de armas, políticos, rubias platino y artistas, The Mutiny es el mosaico desde donde Pedro Medina León, en Bandidos, nos cuenta el episodio de un grupo de jóvenes coludidos con el gobierno de Estados Unidos para enviar armamento clandestino a las fuerzas contrarrevolucionarias nicaragüenses que combaten contra los Sandinistas; mientras tanto, en tiempo presente, el Comanche, el investigador más icónico de Miami, desenreda el asesinato de un hombre que fue encontrado en un contenedor de basura de un Winn Dixie de la Coral Way. ¿Qué tienen en común estas historias y en qué punto se cruzan? El autor guiará minuciosamente al lector hasta la última línea, para entender en qué punto convergen ambos relatos, haciendo un repaso por uno de los capítulos más incómodos en el breve pasado de Miami, pero no por ello menos interesantes.

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