Agustín Fernández Mallo: The Things We ve Seen review - degrees of separation | reviews, news & interviews Agustín Fernández Mallo: The Things We ve Seen review - degrees of separation
Agustín Fernández Mallo: The Things We ve Seen review - degrees of separation
The B-side of reality comes to the fore in this roving exploration of connection and isolation
by Daniel BaksiTuesday, 16 March 2021
Agustín Fernández MalloAina Lorente Solivellas
Trilogies (it is noted, in the term’s Wikipedia entry) “are common in speculative fiction”. They are found in those works with elements “non-existent in reality”, which cover various themes “in the context of the supernatural, futuristic, and many other imaginative topics”.
Natasha Gilmore, Idlewild Books and Open Borders Books, NYC
: This book contains two novellas and some short stories set around Colombia (and occasionally Miami). The narration is often low-affect, sharply cynical, and wryly observed. There’s a cutting honesty in the voice throughout the book that feels totally absent from so much literature now. It reminded me of the feeling of encountering something truly when I was a teenager. But then there’s just the crushing reality of coming into sexuality as a teen, colorism and racism in Colombia, the restlessness wrought by capitalism and the desire to flee yourself and the accidents of your birth that ultimately coalesce into something so universally resonant, that will make any reader feel seen and connected. Truly an author worthy of attention.
The Passion of Diego Armando Maradona
In that fine tradition of Latin American culture, Diego Armando Maradona was nothing if not a magical realist.
There are some who confer beatitude – or, at the very least, that quality that the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges called
everness – simply by touch. In Christian iconography, the Lactation of St Bernard is a miracle experienced by Bernard of Clairvaux, a 12th century abbot who is one of Dante’s guides in the
Divine Comedy. When Bernard kneels at a statue of the Nursing Madonna, Mary springs to life and squeezes out a spectacular squirt of breast milk, which shoots into the praying abbot’s mouth. It is a miracle, after all, and Bernard becomes a saint.