Khristen is born, dies and is resurrected. He conjugates three verbs that even the most common mortals dare not put in the same sentence, and conjugates verbs when he hasn’t even learned to speak. He had been dead long enough to think that his resurrection would be special. That’s why her mother believes she is destined to do great things: to be the compass of humanity, dazzled by the white light of Hades to illuminate the living. Fortunately or unfortunately, Khristen is not restrained, she sees nothing that others do not see. this is not one Greta Thunberg Visionary returning from purgatory, because planet Earth drag (Seix Barral) It is purgatory. In her first novel (and what a novel!), written twenty years later, Joy Williams chronicles Khristen’s journey through the apocalypse without making her a martyr or a means of salvation; that is, it completely avoids all didactic temptations. ecological dystopiamaybe because he knows there’s nothing to teach that we haven’t destroyed anyway.
We are closer to the unpredictable poetics of disaster. background noise of the Don DeLillo solid, desert realism, Pathof the Cormac McCarthy. If it weren’t for the strange compassion that radiates from its pages, born of the orphanage of teenage Khristen, who finds herself in a world of “girls” when the gifted children drop out of the school where her mother has placed her. The term agriculture has lost its meaning” and the ecological manifestos that often repeat words like “drought, desertification, invasion, destruction, degradation, salinization and urbanization” “looked like the excrement of some insects” – and his friendship with Jeffrey. If he speaks like a philosopher, it might as well be a Ballard novel, especially about how the withered clumps of the world rein in its unsettling atmosphere. neoliberal capitalism (this tourist resort turned into the Institute; Apocalypse never came before) like a map dystopia That we all helped design it.
It gives the impression that the characters in this movie are. wonderful The novel remains only language. Ecocritics – school of literary studies interested in analyzing the awakening of literature in the 1970s. ecological awareness They need to draw their pencils to underline the mystique of nature, both hypnotic and inscrutable, through narrative and rhetorical strategies that displace and displace the anthropocentric view of the texts. williams proseespecially the dialogues.
Same way hunter Gracchusof the CaucasianIt seems to serve as an allegory for the story of Khristen, an allegory that even our hero does not know how to absorb, the planet Earth (its collapse, fall into a void where rebirth is impossible) is transformed into a fascinating hieroglyph. It’s confusing because we invented it and forgot how to interpret it.
‘Drag’
Joy Williams
Translation of Javier Calvo
six barrels
320 pages. 19.90 €