The real and its miseries, the real as an exploration, the real as an inexhaustible investigation is what is behind the impulse of one of the most powerful legs of contemporary literature, and two of the recent books set that evidence masterfully. Both the immersion of Javier Cercas in the halls and discrete stays of the Vatican in God’s madman at the end of the world as the conscientious and obsessive inquiry of Philippe Sands in London Street 38 In the impunity of power through offensive immunity they exhibit the powers of literature to auscultate a reality that makes us exploit the head: neither the Vatican is just a maze of evil and subtle powers nor the impunity of dictators such as Augusto Pinochet and the exnazi perpetual Walther Rauff, refugee in Chile for decades for decades.
Neither the Vatican is armored against the good as a daily and daily practice of self -denial and pure goodness of much of their acolytes, as with the missionaries (and the impressive missionaries) that visits and interview features in Mongolia, nor the political state interests could prevent the arrest of Pinochet in 1998 as responsible for crimes against humanity thanks to the tenacity and the chiller Place, Judge Baltasar Garzón, and despite the obvious and flagrant resistances of the government of José María Aznar in his first legislature, according to meticulous fidelity to the facts and conversations Philippe Sands, powerful disciple of fence methods.
Something happens when two the great books of this season are seen and desired in this way with the social, historical and institutional reality when the effort of knowing it is unleashed as it is unleashed in them: Is there any form of nostalgia of the veracity told as authentic novel of intrigue, with suspense, with nuances, with doubts and with shocking revelations? The two books are already resembled at the same time, but they are joined by a furious drive to penetrate contemporary reality and withdraw one by one the layers of thick hypocrisy, prejudices, lies and cheap and fraudulent rumorology that hides it.
What really happens with both books is that their stories are psychopathic to the complex texture of reality and yet the spell of reading makes them great novels without fiction, where the experience of reading becomes an explosive paradox: to live as in fiction the experience of revealing the entity of the facts beyond them Far from the liars and cover -ups that allowed Pinochet to return to unscathed Chile after more than a year detained in London and allowed a confessed and chronic Nazi to advise the detention center of the Chilean dictatorship to the point of building a Auschwitz replica in Chilean lands. Two luxuries of the new fiction.