Every book published by Jon Bilbao (Ribadesella, 1972) confirms that we are dealing with a great storyteller. And to achieve this does not mean, in my opinion, to simplify what the author of the Basilisk can do in the sense that he deals with the narrative genre in a dual aspect, namely the novel and the short story. It is appropriate to place Bilbao in a privileged place among the current narrators of this country, for what it means to question tradition itself without abandoning tradition and exploring the possibilities of genre literature as in western novels.
Her new title Araña, which is published under the label Impedimenta as usual, means a giant step in her career. More and more precise and emphatic about the possibilities offered by his research, the Asturian writer picks up where he left off in the Basilisk: the choice to prolong the life and ups and downs of a character like John Dunbar was easy to discern after his death. First appearance The one-armed man who does not let go of his past and improvises his future as he moves forward has, among other virtues, the opportunity to provide Bilbao with a hinge or gateway between different temporal and spatial planes. Somehow, Araña develops largely through replicas and parallels that are distant in time, but important in his dealings with the development of the characters: behind or alongside John Dunbar, the most contemporary character of Dunbar’s author and creator Jon, or the adolescent Jon himself. has. in the process of developing himself as a writer and silent observer of adult abnormalities.
In a novel where landscape and nature are so important in a Bilbao-like way (if you examine his works it is easy to see how landscape is an element that often intervenes in enigmas in its own way), the power of the word and the narrative acquire the status of an ecosystem through an event that takes place in the novel’s adventures: Araña’. At the beginning of , Dunbar meets a weight writer who makes his living by inventing novels about the gunman: surnamed Bramble and willing to do anything unless the bargain is over.
Literature within literature: a nod to Don Quixote and at the same time an homage to Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, Silver Kane… At this intersection of many impossibilities, Jon Bilbao’s writings grow and become unique: that rift that develops between Conrad and Verne . Dunbar might be a Strogoff with a Marlow’s existential anxiety. Although he is not a classic hero or a cowboy from the Far West. When examining Dunbar’s motives and behavior, one comic character comes to mind most often: Corto Maltese of the great Hugo Pratt. Something that doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to me, given the comic book fans in Bilbao. Lonely, incomprehensible, short explanations: like writers who know no other way than solitude. “You are a man free of moral sanctions and indecision,” Dunbar is told at one point in the novel.
Araña is a novel woven from many stories. Almost everyone has something to say to stand out and justify their existence.
Jon Bilbao does not shyly skim over topics that may sound current to the reader: the relationship between parents and children; couple relationships; religious deception… the gush of text adding possibilities for reading without occupying a central space in my view.
There is also the character/entity that gives the novel its name, let’s say. It is both disturbing and stimulating. The stories are interconnected and develop until the end of the book. A storyteller is out of breath. He questions us as he tells. And I say that Spider, with its paradoxical nature of whip and blessing, may well be a fictional representation, as if I had to answer a question that no one actually asked me.