Next to the keyboard with which I write this new installment of our Letters This is one of the books that I have reread the most and one of the many amulets that I have: I got it many years ago, in the desert.
The amulet is a small glass test tube, similar to those used by health workers when they draw blood to carry out a study. Inside my test tube, of course, what is there is not red nor is it liquid: in total, there are seven tiny stones that could well be confused with corn kernels bathed in lead or with reggaetonero dental implants.
But we'll get to my amulet later. First I want to talk about the book that I also put next to the keyboard and to which I returned, this time, as soon as I finished reading Land of champions, the most recent novel by Diego Zúñiga, with which we say goodbye to the south of the south in a big way, because it is, in Mexican of course, a fucking great book malasumadre. I said, however, that first I would talk about that other book that I have here at my side, that is, the Confessions by Tolstoy.
A lucubration, a babbling
At this point in the game, I would have a hard time believing that there is a reader—especially one who subscribes to a newsletter about books—who has not read or does not know what the books are about. Confessions of the old Russian, whom I refer to this way not because the image we have of him is that of an endless white beard, but because he confessed closer to the third age than the second. Since the exception, however, also gives meaning, I still remind you that the first part of that book is a brilliant, brilliant and hilarious account of the disappointments that life brings to those who, at a certain moment, ask themselves: so that?
And all this for what? Thus, I insist, we can summarize the existential conflict that leads Tolstoy to examine his life through everything he once wanted to cling to, with the aim of justifying his existence, but which ended up multiplying his anxieties, since nothing seemed to bring him closer. to the answer I needed. And for him, neither literature nor science nor mathematics nor philosophy served to respond to what cannot be resolved rationally, since the consequence would be suicide; That question, then, which, Tolstoy also understands, can only be answered from the emergence of a faith. And this is where I wanted to get to, because, although I do not share the faith that Tolstoy chose, I have been convinced for weeks, if not months, that the old Russian is right that the answer to the “why” is in the appearance of a certain faith. .
I want to say – in addition to correcting myself, since what I wanted to get to was not what I just wrote, but what follows – that, for months now, after accepting that thing about faith, although I sensed what mine was, it was nothing but until I finished reading Land of champions, during those seconds in which a novel with the strength of Zúñiga's brings together the memory of its tremors and its astonishments to slap you in the face from the form and the substance, in that moment, I mean, in which the obvious mixes with the suggested and There is that silent explosion that shines between the reader and what could not be told in a better way, that the word that my faith had been chewing – like Beckett's character chews his pebbles – was reaffirmed: narrative.
Land of a faith
Can anything more be said about a novel? I mean: can anything more be added to this?: Land of champions is capable of making you understand or finish accepting, that is, in reality, finishing accepting once and for all that the faith you need in the face of that exhausting “why” and, therefore, to continue holding on, is none other than the conviction that the power of telling is unique, that knowing how to choose what and how to return a story to the world, finding the way that story requires, as well as the tools, point of view and language it needs, is more than enough to hold up everything else.
Honestly, I don't think so. That is to say, I don't think anything else is needed. But here it is not only about my faith, it is also about you reading Zúñiga's novel. Therefore, to finish convincing them, perhaps I should say that Land of champions tells the story of a boy who is born in the middle of the mountain and who ends up, against all odds, after accepting that it can only be underwater, becoming the best underwater hunter on the planet.
That, of course, is the obvious, because what is less obvious, but is also told to us in a superb way, is the breakup of a country—the country in which that child is born, grows up and becomes a man—at the moment in which that his story is doubled.
Before finishing, one more thing: upon emerging from the waters in which the Chungungo submerges and seeing the consequences of the breakup of his country – this is also what the narration left me with – my amulet, which I started talking about here, was no longer such.
And the seven grains that my small glass test tube contained, those that I had collected in Meteorite Field, Chile, lost all their charm.
But why did those space stones lose their charm? To find out, you will have to read Zúñiga.
Advancement, yes, that those pieces of the universe were touched by death.
Coordinates
Land of champions was published by Random House Literature.
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