Ghost Stories, by Siri Hustvedt (Northfield, 1955), is not just a book about loss: it is also a work written from the room that absence leaves when a shared life is broken forever, a book capable of making grief a habitable place. The love letter that is Ghost Stories reflects on the disappearance of love with the clarity of one who knows that pain cannot be tamed with grand gestures, but rather settles into the tiny crevices of everyday life: in an empty chair, in an interrupted sentence, in the unexpected weight of an object that once meant nothing and that, suddenly, becomes a relic. The title is of excellent precision: the ghosts that haunt these pages are not literary specters in the classic sense, but persistent presences of memory, reverberations of an intimacy that resists disappearing. The love for her husband, the writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), is not a memory embellished by art, but a living matter that continues to breathe within loss. The great virtue of the book is its ability to turn intimacy into a universal experience without losing a shred of uniqueness. Hustvedt writes from the wound, but she does so with emotional intelligence, thus avoiding the temptation of grandiloquence or gratuitous melodrama: "I feel Paul's voice". The author's prose, precise and profound, advances with serenity, and analyzes in detail the mechanisms of memory, the traps of recollection, the way the past bursts into the present with devastating force. Every page seems written with the awareness that remembering is, at the same time, an act of love and a condemnation. The presence of Paul Auster's unpublished writings adds a moving dimension, because they do not function as a mere editorial hook or a sentimental appendix, but as an organic extension of the narrative. The voice of the author of Leviathan emerges as a form of continuity that crosses the text and turns it into a posthumous dialogue, into an interrupted conversation resumed by literature. There is a very deep emotion in this inclusion: the feeling that writing is the last place where two lives can continue to find each other. It is also remarkable how Hustvedt reflects on identity when the loving bond disappears. Who are we when the other, who had helped us define ourselves, is no longer there? What remains of the self after annihilation? These questions run through the book like an underground current and give it a philosophical density that goes far beyond personal chronicle. Grief is not just the loss of a loved one; it is also the loss of a version of oneself, of shared time, of an intimate language built in two voices.A stunning, elegant, and profoundly human book

Ghost Stories is a work of painful beauty, the kind that doesn't just explain an experience, but makes it resonate within the reader. Hustvedt demonstrates that great literature is capable of entering the most vulnerable areas of existence without simplifying them. The author writes a book about grief, yes, but above all she gives us a book about the persistence of love, about memory as a form of resistance, and about the word as a space where the dead continue to speak with us. Striking, elegant, and profoundly human, it leaves a mark that is difficult to erase.Beyond the strictly autobiographical dimension, Ghost Stories also reads as a profound meditation on the very nature of literature. Hustvedt seems to ask what writing can do in the face of the irreparable. Literature does not console in an easy sense, it does not heal or restore what has been lost, but it does offer a verbal architecture where pain can take shape. Writing is a way of not letting oneself be swallowed by the void. Each sentence seems to be sustained by this tension between silence and the need to speak, between the abyss of loss and the urgency of giving it a grammar. Hustvedt has written a marvelous book that is at once an elegy, an emotional essay, and a piece of memory, with a narrative maturity worthy of the great voices who know that the word is the only possible form of survival.

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In How to Write About Africa and Other Texts, a collection of articles and chronicles available in Catalan from Eumo Editorial, translated by Martí Sales, the Kenyan journalist and writer Binyavanga Wainaina (Nakuru, 1971–Nairobi, 2019) offered a long list of recommendations to white Western authors on how to write about the African continent. The list was sarcastic: it caricatured the ignorant clichés, the biased reductionism, and the hypocritical, redemptorist paternalism with which we white Westerners tend to approach the so-called "black continent". Furthermore, the list served Wainaina to implicitly assert the vast and immensely rich complexity of authentic Africa. Some of Wainaina's phrases: After reading Wainaina's text, it is impossible not to consider it as a yardstick to measure the ethical and moral credibility and the cultural and intellectual insight of books set in Africa written by white authors. Such as, for example, the novel The Trophy, by the Belgian author Gaea Schoeters (1976). From a plot point of view, the materials Schoeters handles are extremely risky, cliché-ridden, Hemingway revisited and subtly infused with Joseph Conrad: an American white hunter, who has made a fortune by investing in the stock market, has bought the permit to hunt a black rhinoceros, the missing piece in his extensive collection of trophies and the gift he wants to give his beloved wife, who awaits him in New York while he is in Africa. Extremely risky and cliché-ridden, as I said. But Schoeters, aware of the pitfalls she can fall into – crude and condescending simplifications, but also the Manichean and self-punitive romanticization of the guilty white person – overcomes the test with flying colors. That Schoeters is a bold author is demonstrated by the fact that her white hunter protagonist's name is Hunter White, which in English means "white hunter". A thriller unfolding in a progressively ominous way

There are two reasons that explain why El trofeu is not only not a mediocre novel about Africa (touristified fiction, postcard literature) but is also an excellent novel. The first reason is that the properly novelistic elements function like a gear in which everything is in place and works in a resounding and fluid way: the plot, a thriller, unfolds in a progressively ominous manner; the characters, both white and African, have a dense psychological and moral background, are loaded with reasons for being as they are and for doing what they do, and also have a representative weight of the civilizations and worlds to which they belong without ceasing to be unique individuals; and, finally, the prose, agile and muscular, concrete and atmospheric, is a suitable vehicle both for the exploration of serious moral dilemmas and for the narration of action and adventure situations and scenes.The second reason is more difficult to summarize, but it is even more decisive: it is the essayistic dimension that, in a settled, always astutely incorporated way, is present in El trofeu and makes it more than a novel. This essayistic dimension, which never erupts in the form of an excursus but always appears integrated into dialogues, actions, and thoughts, gives an exhaustive and plural vision of the contradictory and often tragic African reality: ecosystems, business forms, animal and human predators, languages, rites, cultures, history, gods, struggles and coexistence, what is ancestral and what is geopolitical... In El trofeu, hunting is the axis around which memorable experiences (in the best sense of the word, and also in the worst) and a fascinating world are articulated.

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When Transbordo en Moscú, the last volume of Las tres leyes del movimiento, Eduardo Mendoza (Barcelona, 1943) thought it was time to retire. "The best thing I could do was retire, because I had already written everything I wanted to –he recalls at Casa del Libro in Barcelona–. Then I started to get bored and thought I would do something else without forgetting that I was in injury time." That was five years ago and, since then, Mendoza has published Tres enigmas para la Organización (2024) and, just this week, La intriga del funeral inconveniente, both published by Seix Barral, like the rest of his work. "Eduardo has often considered stopping writing and has even announced it, but we are lucky that he has done the opposite afterwards –admits Elena Ramírez, his editor–. Last year was very hectic for him, with everything that the Princess of Asturias Award and several trips entailed, including the Guadalajara Book Fair. Nothing suggested he was working on a new novel".

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A little overshadowed by the enormous Carson McCullers and those teenage girl characters who wander through dusty towns full of criminal secrets while on the cusp of adulthood, Siri HustvedtFor her second novel, so far unpublished in Catalan, she created a nineteen-year-old Lily Dahl and placed her in a town in Minnesota (which couldn't have been very different from her own) where she serves coffee in the money that lies beneath her house as she observes the behavior of the regular customers. She's an aspiring actress, dreams of running away to the big city and making it big, but her reality is making scrambled eggs for Franck and Dick, a pair of brothers who are farmers and barely speak, or some bacon for Martin Petersen, a former childhood playmate who has become an ex-con. She has a neighbor who is a retired actress who helps her prepare for a role in a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream And, above all, a tenant in the hotel across the street named Ed Shapiro, who is famous and incredibly handsome. At night, Lily secretly watches him paint, driven by his creative fever, and the erotic game soon begins.

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We are what happens to us. We are what we want, we are what we lack. We are what those who love us or mistreat us make us. We are the place where we grew up. We are the places we have fled from and the places we have tried to reach. The protagonist-narrator ofWith rage in my bodyThe novel, by the French author Sorj Chalandon (1952), tells the story of a boy—a teenager, a young man: we see him grow up throughout the novel—who has suffered nothing but misfortune, who longed for a loving family but never had one, whom no one has ever loved, and whom many mistreat. In one instance, he is imprisoned in France. The institution's name is the House of Supervised Institution, and its official objective is to reform the inmates so they can work at sea or in the fields, but in practice, it is a hell where dehumanization and brutality prevail.

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"When we think we write our readings, we are actually writing our lives," we read in Camera obscura cannon (Seix Barral), the new novel byEnrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, ​​​​1948). The book, explained by someone who could be an android – the first to be incorporated into Vilamatian literature –, takes us into 48 hours of obsessive writing, motivated by the memory of a dead writer and the creation of a literary canon made from randomly chosen fragments of authors such as Robert Walser. Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Carlo Emilio Gadda.

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"This novel has several origins, but the first was an early vocation to write that, however, did not find the time to grow," explained Benjamín G. Rosado (Ávila, 1985) this Thursday at noon in the Hall of Mirrors of the Gran Teatre del Liceu on the occasion of the awarding of the 67th Biblioteca Breve award, worth 30,000 euros, thanks to his first novel, The flight of man, in which the journalist, critic and cultural manager asks himself how fiction can change the plot of our lives. "I haven't written until now because of a lack of time, in my case, but because of attitude: at home literature has always been something very serious and I didn't feel capable of playing that role," continued Rosado, who to construct this story took a sabbatical year and travelled around some of the settings of the novel, from New York to Buenos Aires. "I did all this so as not to write anything about my own adventures," he specified, to avoid any link with autofiction. And he has described the story as "a Byzantine novel," in reference to some crucial elements of the book, such as "adventures and love."

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