mine from others

The branding of this new Ovejero book takes a time and place of reference: the childhood of a boy in a working-class neighborhood in the seventies. Strange World’s author’s choice of this location and latitude allows him to paint a personal and global portrait. And returning to the question of character, the identification between private biography and community biography gives the book an important bias; this is what the Shepherd Dog himself is responsible for manifesting in the story “Everything that happens around us happens to us”. We are, of course, against the narrative axis of the network of stories and portraits of the past that make up the volume almost halfway through the book.

“It is impossible to write an autobiographical work without talking about what is happening around us, because everything that happens around us happens to us.” From the words I have just quoted, Ovejero reveals his poetics and narrative politics, which have become the same thing in his case. Before we get to this point in the book, we encounter some stories that point to a playing field dominated by failure and its power-relationship (it is often said that the family is a representation of society at scale). If so, the performance we attended sounds familiar to us: Spain in the Seventies; the transition from Francoism to democracy; a heavily charged air; an impunity patriarchy; the desire for social ascendancy of the most humble classes; migration from the countryside to the city… All the elements that make up the breeding ground of While We Are Dead are included. Based on that story/axis mentioned above, the character of the political writer is reinforced; ethical perspective. Mine from others seem to vary in the pages Ovejero writes. This clear positioning does not diminish the literary commitment. The subject is never political literature. The problem is literature that is only political. So how do you call it “literature”?

It should also be taken into account that we are dealing with a maverick writer; trying to challenge himself. From the sober corner of this critic, Ovejero always tried not to repeat himself; Trust the writing’s own capacity to surprise.

As We Die, which is circular in anatomy, it begins and ends around the father figure. From ritual to ritual In the middle, the narrator tells an entire story with more twisted lines than we think, and suggests a change by chance. We’ve seen it on screens called Quinqui cinema, which is nothing more than a chronology of those who lose progress: “Unhappiness is the cause of progress, civilizations are built by unhappy people.”

We have to thank Ovejero for the discomfort and remorse his stories have caused us. This discomfort is proof that I am everyone and everyone is me. It is difficult to force ourselves to these conclusions without declarations or demagogy. Thirty forty years later, it’s enough to try to take the same picture you took that day, with the same heroes. Not just time passing, but purity like a nail to hold on to.

He says he was also questioning us while we were dead (isn’t that the same thing?).

As the author himself puts it: “Many of the events that I placed in the past continue to happen in the present.”