Donde el silencio se bifurca
«Pronto voy a morir.» Así comienza esta novela perturbadora y exigente, un largo monólogo (¿desde el limbo?) entre la realidad y la irrealidad. Angustia, opresión y miedo son palabras esenciales en el relato de un hombre que piensa el mundo: desde la enfermedad a los males de nuestro tiempo. Lección moral, y de lucidez, en medio de la consumación, el hombre que nos habla en este relato ejemplar podría ser personaje de un renacido Thomas Bernhard o del mismísimo Dante (del limbo a las puertas del infierno). Un país dividido por la guerra, una joven periodista torturada y asesinada, hambre y desolación… El Apocalipsis no está tan lejos, y de cuando en cuando aparece a la vuelta de la esquina. «Es posible que la antesala de la muerte sea la propia muerte.» Desde El asco, de Horacio Castellanos Moya, pocos «exabruptos» a la altura de éste nos ha ofrecido la literatura en español.
«Debes contar tu historia antes de que sea demasiado tarde. Todos tienen que hacerlo. Pero ¿quién quiere escuchar a todos? O mejor dicho: si todos cuentan su historia, ¿quién va a escuchar? Necesitamos que unos aprendan a no decir por un momento para que otros se esfuercen en decir algo significativo.»
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(Silence Splits) “Soon I will die. I’m not saying this because of the bird that has crossed my window (if that’s a window). Neither because the silence around me is almost total (at times I still hear white noise), but because there’s absolutely nothing else left to happen to me.” This is how this excellent novel starts off, so far unpub- lished, that can be related very successfully to the literature of the Latin American Boom. With the litera- ture of the 60’s and 70’s.
Journalists, murders, cops… The noir novel “by other means”, could be said. As in Piña’s previous novels, the prose in the book does not wallow in rhetorical twists, but builds upon image and reflexion.. Also, upon an imagination that knows how to dive in reality, in the present of violence and meaninglessness.
At odds with other current almost nineteenth-century-esque novels, in which biographies are depicted “clearly” and backdrops are too trite, Piña exploits here the traits of the novel as space for suggestion and research on the human. The reading of one of its best passages teaches us, as well, that stories can also be told through dreams and also through the senses.
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PRESS
“Beyond its themes and fantastic‐style resources –and by the former I mean Henry James, and Edgar Allan Poe and his Latin American epigones–, Piña’s narrative responds to the course of Anglo Saxon’s top 19th Century literature, brought into the present of our language. A hard‐to‐pigeonhole writer,
magnificent reader and valuable critic who knew how to avoid neither being boxed in Academia nor going headlong towards the spectacular publishing landscape.” David Miklos, Nexos Revista Digital
“Gerardo Piña lets us know that the veracity in the language is farther then one would assure as truthful.”
Gilma Luque, Revista Variopinto
“Gerardo Piña manages to keep captive the attentive reader, not so much by his stories, but by his invertebrate tendency to maintain him or her in a state of constant strangeness and this feature, in this times of absolute complacency with the reader from the formal point of view, is something to be thankful for, as he forces to exercise all the time the imagination and try to stitch up the impossible reality of the narrated facts. Without a doubt, an uncompromising author.” Gregorio Martínez Moctezuma, Azteca 21