“Match”, by Pablo Ottonello. Vinyl, 96 pages, $5,400.
Based on a topic that has been widely used in the last decade, the search for sex and/or love in a dating app, Pablo Ottonello writes a novel that is fun, fierce and as dark as unsatisfied desire.
A typical man from the well-off middle class (Palermo, psychoanalysis, Gramsci readings and imported car) avoids the grief of his separation by going out with girls he meets on apps. Thus, he describes a varied gallery of characters, funny but ruthless (some women may find it quite annoying), made up of his occasional companions. The protagonist agrees with his psychoanalyst in considering himself incapable of committing. The cruelty of his gaze operates, above all, against himself.
“Match” retells stories that we have already been told but manages to renew them. His writing, light and painful, makes the difference by far.
“A new life”, by Lucía Berlin. Alfaguara, 336 pages, $11,999.
Although she died in 2004, Lucía Berlin was rediscovered in 2016, when “Manual for Cleaning Women” was republished, a collection of wonderful stories from 1977, based on her experience cleaning houses. Almost all of her literature is impregnated with her life, full of economic ups and downs and modest jobs, alcoholism and failed marriages.
The volume now published by the Alfaguara label, “A New Life”, completes the total of his work in Spanish. This is a very special book. It brings together unpublished stories in Spanish such as, for example, “Manzanas”, his first story. It also contains essays and articles and his travel diaries. The most notable thing, however, is that the edition is in the hands of his son Jeff Berlin, who below each story narrates the context in which it was created. A detailed biography of Lucía completes the volume. Another plus: the general prologue is written by the Spanish Sara Mesa. An essential text to discover Berlin or reaffirm her love for her.
“The emotional life of populism”, by Eva Illouz. Katz, 192 pages, $11,900.
Trained in France, this sociologist of Moroccan origin develops much of her professional life in Israel. The first of her books published among us, “Why Love Hurts,” had great impact due to the originality of her sociological approach to romantic relationships, a topic in which Illouz is a pioneer. In her new book, she draws on her knowledge of the emotional field to analyze how affects are shaped by politics. The subtitle of the volume is “How Fear, Loathing, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy.” Israel’s current politics is the terrain where Illouz demonstrates the destructive power of populism for current democracies, an element that makes her book doubly interesting. Highly recommended, it has an extra quality: the pedagogical simplicity of its writing.
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Source: Yenny and El Ateneo Bookstores.
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