Fernando Villamía won the 56th Kutxa Ciudad de San Sebastián Literary Awards with his latest short story book Dioses de quince años published by Algaida. The course of this very friendly and naturally humble treatment of Vitoria, a quality so rare in the literary world, is followed by Felipe Trigo and the City of Badajoz, or finalist status in the prestigious Setenil Prize, the most prestigious award in the short story genre in Spain.
Fifteen Years of Dioses collects twelve stories that pay homage to the classic segment of the genre, with its introduction, middle, and conclusion, among other virtues, an almost revolutionary position at this time. Indeed, these round tales, yearning for a somewhat discredited and discredited narrative with the stigma of the story or the other dedicated solely to suggestion, are appreciated where the reader can at some point get on solid ground.
One of the most striking aspects of Villamía’s stories, besides being very recognizable to me, is the style that relates to Luis Landero’s prose. In the author’s sentences, the vocabulary used, the syntactic structure, and the aesthetic will dissolved in beautiful lyrical discoveries, there is a style of writing literature that I miss and now only find in the writers of the Villamía generation.
Another point to be underlined in the tales of the Fifteen-year-old Gods is the mastery of the author for the beginning. Villamía’s ability to draw the reader’s attention to the story that has just begun with just a few sentences is an excellent illustration of what classical rhetoricians would call the captatio, but it does not need benevolence, as philanthropy naturally arises in the reader and removes it. is for reading. The cultural references seen in all the stories are also interesting. Far from pedantic fraud, their relevance is absolute, and they are combined with stories as perfect complements, illustrating the troubles of the heroes by their example. Finally, the flirtation between fantasy literature and the almost plausible paranormal completes the appeal of these tales.
The vulnerabilities of the characters in Fifteen-Year-Old Dioses hurt, but their greatness resides in the same fragile territory. A heart bursting with the love of the wind; an overweight teenager who admits to the humiliation of his classmates in the beautiful cemetery; the liberation of art from dementia; the dog who finds himself in the mysterious werewolf; letters from a child to his deceased father (“Dear Daddy, you have now gone to live to die…”); threads that unite or are cut with vengeance; a photographer’s obsession with getting a picture of God; hammer to end harassment; a meta-literature course; complicity in silence; the dead returning for an idyll; the mystery of sex and the necessity of childhood. And in all of them, Aurora is the same name for different characters, perhaps because in all of them, the dawn of life triumphs after the long night of suffering.