As Nikos Kazantzakis says in his novel The Life and Adventures of Alexis Zorba, a so-called seaman emerges from the depths, who tells a flashback story to a woman sitting on the sand among the waves of the sea. Undoubtedly, the great invention of literature is the narrator. And this vast and fateful sea is the adversary of the mathematician, who takes him underwater in the purest style of Homer’s Charybdis, and on the one hand, gives us a witness-narrator, as in the triple play. snatches the hero of a story and on the other hand. This story opens the Oriente anthology written by writer and film director Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón (Torrelavega, Cantabria, 1942), which published Anagrama in the Hispanic Narratives collection a few months ago. In this story the author uses a Borgean narrator, that is, the scribe narrator, a person named Gutiérrez who knows a story and tells it to us.
Gutiérrez Aragón, an academic at the Spanish Royal Academy and the Royal Academy of Arts in San Fernando – winner of the 2009 Herralde Award for his novel La vida antes de marzo – is a film director as well as a writer. In the field of cinema, he received awards at the Berlinale and the San Sebastián Film Festival, and was also awarded the Goya Prize.
The short story has been handled more abundantly and successfully in Spanish narration by Latin American writers than by Spanish writers such as Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández, Juan Carlos Onetti and Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Adolfo Bioy Casares. From Julio Cortázar to Mexican Juan Rulfo and Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. The Spaniards were more novelists. Perhaps the two important readers of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the founders of the modern short story, were precisely Borges and Cortázar. It combines the story and the fantasy of Latin America, which is not so common in our country. Apart from some authors such as Wenceslao Fernández Flórez and Animated Forest, Spain is mostly psychological, realistic novels or what they call historical novels, although the main hero of Spanish literature, Don Quixote, reads fantastic chivalry stories. For all of the above, a writer from our country who delves into the story and in one of them can see a sense of strangeness, in which, as Gutiérrez Aragón suggests, Cortázar describes fantasy or a surreal vision of reality. Your stories are not irrelevant.
As he said in a recent interview, the author, who believes that reading great narrative works is more important for a film director, thinks that his origin is more in literature. If we recall the golden age of classical cinema, you always get the feeling that literature itself is closely linked, as there are often adaptations of great novels; .
In this collection of eight short stories, there is one specifically set at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Ópera interruptida. While attendees to an opera are locked in the theater after a street brawl by an unidentified militia, the assistants chatter like an orchestra playing on the deck of the Titanic, while a part of the parade steadfastly waits for the ship to sink. boat. The argument is developed at the same time as omitting the so-called narrative ellipse, which is an important element in stories; Why are these unknown militias besieging the theater? One of the characters returns by offering to hand over one of the princesses in the audience to the militia. This neglect can lead to alienation, a veneer of fantastic realism.
The story that names the volume Oriente is linked, say, to the family history of Gutiérrez Aragón, who has no complexes about what is called self-fiction because he says there is always something in the novels. . , that is how he understands it in the narration of the story.