Recommended of the week:
“The Eye of Goliath” by Diego Muzzio.
Entropy, 182 pp. $2100.
Every man on Earth has to wage some war and that war, most of the time, begins and ends within himself. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson and his novel “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, Diego Muzzio’s “The Eye of Goliath” is a fantastic story, built like Chinese boxes, about the “other” with the that we fight, to prevent the advance of madness.
The story begins when Dr. Edward Pierce, psychiatrist, former combatant of the First World War and director of a mental health center in Edinburgh; receives a visit from David Alan Stevenson, coincidentally, a relative of the writer. The man brings him a seriously ill patient, engineer David Bradley, who has alarming symptoms: he can’t stop incessantly doing swimming-like movements. Bradley has spent time at the lighthouse called “Ojo de Goliat” in Tierra del Fuego, trying to get it up and running. From there he has come out delirious. It is not a minor fact that the engineer is also a former combatant. “”No one who had not spent a season on the front (…) could even imagine the psychic earthquake (or earthquake) that the constant threat of annihilation can produce in a human being”, thought Pierce, who was seriously investigating the powers of hypnosis, in people with post-war disorders. It was the 1920s and psychiatry was perceived as the science of the future.
The second part of the novel tells us, with a diary, how Bradley lost his mind at the end of the world, surrounded by loneliness, sea and ghosts. The final war is waged by Pierce and is an intellectual dispute between psychiatrists, psychological healing methods and archetypal enemies: England vs. Germany.
With poetry and humor, Diego Muzzio recreates in “The Eye of Goliath” the nostalgic atmosphere of travel books and adventure novels. But also, he points out the vanishing point where the mind feels so much war, failure and darkness.
Muzzio is Argentine but has lived in France for many years. He has a consolidated work in poetry, stories and, especially, children’s stories. Editorial Entropía has also published “Mockba” and “The invisible spheres”. A very interesting author worth reading on.
ERRANDUS II by Malele Penchanski
Cuttlefish Bones, 83 pp. $2300.
In the short novel “Errandus II”, Malele Penchansky (a writer and journalist with a long career) goes through the biography of Emma, its protagonist, with the random order of the memories that assail us. Accompanied by the disturbing photos of Mariana Eliano, the characters follow one another (rapists, nobles, lovers). The scenes of love and violence alternate and sometimes are just a succession of words. “It is preferable to watch, spy, expiate. (…) Motorize desire”, says the poet-narrator of this story, which is like a dark dream that cannot be escaped.
Make-up by Daphné B.
Blatt&Ríos, 219 pp., $2,790.
The subtitle of this atypical book is “Essay on the world and its shadows”, and in it its author, a Canadian poet and essayist; she travels the world of female beauty from her personal experience, but also from the place that the beautification industry has in capitalism. Fragmentary and poetic, it is worth reading in a feminist key.
Chic, Eclectic Memories of Felisa Pinto
Lumen, 348 pp., $4,499.
Mythical journalist, Felisa Pinto made writing about fashion and trends an entire genre. She collaborated in Primera Plana, Confirmado, La Opinion, La Nación and Página / 12. She met avant-garde artists and writers and helped train new designers in the ’90s. In “Chic” she reviews the most important moments of a brilliant career.
the most read
Fiction
1- “The city of frogs”
Hugo Alconada Mon
2- “Violet”
Isabel Allende
3-“Decent people”
Leonard Padura
4- “The spell of water”
Florence Bonelli
5- “Branch”
Martin Caparros
Non-fiction
1- “This pain is not mine”
mark wolynn
2- “The power of words”
Mariano Sigman
3- “Reset your intestines”
Facundo Pereyra
4- “Determined”
Maria Florence Freijo
5- “The days of the revolution, 1806-1820”
Eduardo Sacheri
(Source: Yenny and El Ateneo bookstores).
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