In 2003, open microphones captured how economist Jordi Sevilla told the then opposition leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero who would explain abstruse economic issues “in two afternoons.” It was a very popular anecdote, and, by the way, in 2011 Seville threw irony and published a book entitled The economy in two afternoons (Deusto).
The writer Sergio del Molino jokes with which this anecdote, present in some conversations between friends, could have been the germ of the new collection he runs in Editorial Alliance. “We thought it would be great for someone to explain to Dostoevski in two afternoons and that it would be wonderful that someone was a passionate reader, to transmit your passion and offer you an entrance port.” The wonder has worked in the form of small books, around one hundred pages, Pocket format, where writers of the present tell their hitch with dead writers (and belonging to the Alliance catalog).
In the first batch of the collection Two afternoons with …Del Molino writes about Joseph Roth, Espido Freire about Jane Austen and Manuel Vilas about Franz Kafka. These are small, close, non -academic essays, which seek to be part of full law of the work of the reviewers.
“It’s no surprise that I had to write about Jane Austen, I’ve been talking about her for 20 years,” says Freire. “In fact I would have offended me if it hadn’t been so,” he jokes. Austen is a well -known writer (and very adapted to the cinema), but not so read, especially among the male audience: the Jane Austen Museum House has been proposed for this year, when 250 of its birth are fulfilled, to make it reach more gentlemen. Austen goes beyond the loving in the period of the regency, where it seems pigeed, and displays a remarkable satire and irony, among other aspects that usually overlook.
“The key to its modernity is that if you forget the high waist dresses and the mannerisms of the time, you are currently the same: the impossibility of being the same due to social pressure, the need to maintain the forms when your heart or your head work in a different way … or the absolute prevalence of stupidity,” says Freire. In his book, by chapters, he dissects the many janes That there were in Austen: the girl, the reader, the single, the wandering or, of course, the writer.
Vilas’s relationship with Franz Kafka also has love dyes. “I’m not a Kafka reader, I’m his crush,” he says. Kafka is the writer who made him want to be a writer and since his reading began he has never left that “black hole.” On the occasion of this essay he has had the opportunity to read it whole, who knows, perhaps for the last time. How to address this obsession, especially taking into account everything that has been said and written about Praguense? Well, through a dictionary, but in which each entry, more than a definition, offers a personal vision. Some entries: absurd, Max Brod, officials, K, Milena Jlesenská and even Madrid (because an uncle from Kafka lived in Madrid, as a driver’s director).
Vilas says that Kafka’s work is “stainless” and that it remains completely in force. “Kafka is behind Putin’s brain and Trump’s brain, artificial intelligence, anguish before the bureaucracy. When we feel persecuted by the State, or by the administration, or by the Treasury, or by the neighbor, is Kafka behind. Everyone who feels guilty without knowing why, has Kafka behind.” And he likes to explain it more expressively, in the pure Vilas style: “Kafka is to literature what Elvis is popular culture and Messi to football.”
Joseph Roth’s alcoholism
Sergio del Molino has also adopted a personal approach when addressing Joseph Roth, an author who was already adult, who had nothing to do at the birth of his vocation, but whose presence has been growing more and more. He considers him something like a prophet of the Holocaust: he died alcoholized in Paris in 1939, without seeing World War II or the extermination of the Jewish people. “He was born in Galitzia, a region where the Jews predominated and where there are no longer Jews: Roth knew that this was going to happen and said it again and again,” says Del Molino. His identity was diffuse: Galitzia was part of the Austro -Hungarian Empire, today Ukraine, but he didn’t know where Roth was, by his own errance and for the turbulent geopolitical changes of his time.
“So diffuse was his identity that when he died they had to call a rabbi and a priest to make two ceremonies, because no one knew well which one corresponded,” says Del Molino. But behind that blurred identity, the writer found a strong thread to throw: his alcoholism. “I think that Rsth was a drunk, an alcoholic who never denied his alcoholism, although his friends tried many times to leave the drink,” he says. That does not mean that Roth was not aware of his problem. “There are many traces in his literature that he was aware of how alcohol razed him. But he could not depart: he had a love relationship with his addiction and that marks his literature.” And that is the mode that has found the mill of explaining its passion for Roth. And in just two afternoons.