Of all the dreams of youth, those who do not end up breaking are those who demand a guilty silence, or those who one day discovered the taste of betrayal, or those who leave a bitter love trail, or those others who, of Being fulfilled, they would take a better reality than they stay. Life, definitely, always goes on its way and it is hard to look back if it is not to invoke what was going to happen and it did not happen. The Mexican writer Juan Villoro has taken nine years to publish a novel after reef. This is now titled the land of the Great Promise (Random House literature) and is made of layers, of layers that some were also dreams.
«From the title there is already memory, because the land of the great promise is (first) the film by the Polish director Andrzj Vajda who spent the cineteca of Mexico City on March 24, 1982, when the fire devastated the building and the 6,000 films that he kept, erasing part of the country's film memory. It was a premonitory fire. Mexico was then also a country of good auguries with a government called 'The Administration of Abundance' ».
That good omen, like the flames, was also diminishing until it is nothing. And that day of March, that of the Great Lumbre, Diego González, young aspiring director and then university, attended the surrender of the cineteca with a teacher and two class friends. That was the beginning of something. That was nailed in Diego's memory. That, that ... The promise was never already the same. Neither the land that drove it.
With this story, sometimes with bursts of Thriller, around Villoro the journey that goes from the 80s of the last century to the 20th of Mexico, from the city of Mexico to Barcelona, of the young aspirant to the documentary manager in which he becomes Diego. There is an accident with a narco, a relationship with a father, there is love and loyalty ... in all this investigates the land of the great promise.
"In some way, that fire of national cineteca continued to burn, because many causes were opened. The cause of that sinister was never learned. Neither was it an attack or an accident. Nor how many people died. He was one of the many grievances of Mexican life never resolved, "says Villoro.
His protagonist sees his trade and then faces a broken country. Over the years, he has married a sonidist, he speaks asleep and he realizes an intimate nightmare, something that at some point occurred and what he has not escaped. His woman captures her nocturnal words, what he says and confesses in dreams.
"But also by day," explains Villoro, "Diego confesses other things as documentalist, because he does not control the material he uses to record the present Mexican convulse. Diego has the opportunity to interview a Mexican capo in a security house of Michoacán and, inadvertently, becomes a delator and accomplice from an organized crime sector. So as much asleep as I wake up Diego enters narratives that he does not control at all ».
That is, in some way, the strength of the novel. Also the reflection on how we tell reality. And even more: how what we are witnesses commits us. Juan Villoro is one of the great narrators in Spanish, able to make a novel a party without gender. Or, better: a bold sum of them. In the land of the great promise there is narration and bursts of tale, chronicle journalistic, testing. A rarity that is its own voice. And with these tools he builds a novel that also crosses corruption scenarios, fears, distortions, political disappointments ...
"The novel is an extraordinary mechanism to explore life. It tries what happened, but also of what could be. All of us carry a parallel life, a conjectural existence. We are the people we married someone, but in the same extent that we do not get married to another person. Our life is made of things that we affirm and do, but also of cancellations, "says Villoro.
And, thus, his protagonist does not stop thinking about this potential part of his own biography in his secret life and in the contemporary Mexico. "This unfolding," explains the author, "also has longing, desire and illusion, which in the end are resistance exercises in any life, but also in any country designed with interest. Well, reality always leaves something to duty ». Hence, imagination, reconstitution and fantasy are compensatory forms to cope with reality.
Between the real and the unexplored, with an extraordinary narrative, the land of the great promise slides. Mirror, too, from a polarized, deranged, suspicious world where more and more is the literature that can go further, because today, the immediate, has releasing the flames again.
Date Of Update: 08 December 2021, 21:24
