Jürgen and Thomas Roth were born in Bad Berlenurg, Germany. They are brothers. One is a philosopher. The other is a historian. They both love birds. And write about them. But they don’t do this widely. His latest book, Critique of Birds (published in Spain by the always interesting Cielo Eléctrico publishing house), is perhaps the most stupidly brilliant and entertaining book of the year. It looks like some kind of ornithological manual, but it is actually a major literary work in form and content. A mirror through which we can look at humans through everything we should hate about birds. Or better yet, everything that makes them powerfully and disgustingly human. No, it’s not the kind of book that would appear on best-of-the-year lists, but it has to be at the top somehow.
And because? Because it is a good example of what literature can do with everything it touches. Transform it into something else. Expand the path until it reflects everyone who crosses it. Break all ideas of preconceptions and push something as seemingly small – or specific – as the narrated life of nuthatches, sparrows and woodpeckers into an aesthetic exercise and anthropological philosophical reflection, but from an anthropology that dismantles the idea. Something that centers the human or the non-human. And he does it so playfully – laughing at everything and everyone – that sometimes it seems like, at its core, a humorous book where the reader decides how deep they want to go, and that can be too much.
This does not happen in CJ Hauser’s fragmentary and addictive literature, although it also deals with birds. Because your situation is different but equally impressive. CJ Hauser lives in Hamilton, New York. Ten days after calling off her wedding — which she hilariously ran away with for something she calls Scullymulderism, an interesting theory about love and life based on The X-Files — she went on an expedition to Texas to study the crane. The whooping crane is a species of high stork. In fact, it is the tallest bird in the United States. It measures more than one and a half meters. However, it was not the height of the crane that attracted Hauser’s attention, but his own life.
Relentless swimmer Diana Nyad, magnificently portrayed by Annette Bening in the film Nyad directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, set out to swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of 28 and became a world star in open water marathon swimming. . . To avoid being eaten by one of the 49 shark species found in these waters, She entered a cage and set off. I had to swim for 60 hours. Unceasingly. Did he understand? No. She soon gave up swimming and devoted herself to sports journalism. She became a commentator. One day, while in the movie with Jodie Foster, who was extremely understanding, she decided she had to try again. She was 61 years old at that time.
What moved him 30 years later was the question Mary Oliver used to end her famous poem Midsummer’s Day. The question is, “Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one, wild, precious life?” Nyad came across her mother while going through one of the books she had taken from home when she died. What started as a frontal attack on his mother: «Did he really point to this page? HE? “That you haven’t done anything in your life?” – this ended with a thought that made him understand why he did not swim across that part of the Pacific Ocean that no one had crossed before or since. 28 years old. I did not realize at the time the significance of what Mary Oliver’s question suggested.
It is CJ Hauser’s way of pursuing herself that she does not want to stop being and, in extreme cases, saves: the woman who will not marry and therefore will not disappear into a relationship that does not involve a kind of blindness. Mulder and Scully’s faith in each other, the blind faith that causes one of them to run for the simple fact that the other is running, knowing that’s exactly what they’re supposed to do – at one of the rehearsals for Bride Crane. (Asteroid Books) has something to do with the fact that Nyad started doing this at age 61. Neither of them wanted to disappear and luckily, a lifeboat came their way.
Turna Gelin is not the kind of book that will be included in the best of the year lists, but based on what I have said, it should be at the top somehow.