A student approaches me and says in a very apologetic tone of voice, “Professor Clarissa, I like reading.”
Then she seems very scared of what she said and proceeds to explain this strange preference, “I just do. I don’t know why but I simply enjoy reading.”
“This is good,” I say, trying to sound as reassuring as possible. “I like reading, too.”
“So I was thinking,” the student says, “would you be able to recommend any books in Spanish that I could read?”
I’ve been hoping for years to hear this question. Oh joy, oh happiness! A student in a literature course actually likes to read.
I will now recommend the books I have read in Spanish this month and really enjoyed. Since many people who read this blog are not Spanish-speakers, I will put the recommendations under the fold.
1. Benjamin Prado is a writer from Spain whose work I only discovered a few weeks ago. I already love him, though. His novel Mala gente que camina is narrated by a hapless high school teacher of literature who is trying to save his research from being boring by investigating the life of a writer who militated in the fascist Falange while writing a novel to denounce the crimes of the Spanish fascists. For those who are learning Spanish, this novel is great because it reads very easily and has a great plot.
2. Edmundo Paz Soldan is my former colleague from Cornell and also a great writer. I just finished his novel Norte, and I enjoyed it almost in spite of myself. I’m not sure what the writer was trying to do with the novel but what he achieved to do with me is almost to convince me that all Hispanic immigrants in the US are crazy, lazy or hazy. But the book is very well written, so I highly recommend.
3. Almudena Grandes from Spain is continuing her series of novels about the Republican maquis who kept fighting against the Franco dictatorship long after the Civil War was officially over. The most recent installment in the series is El lector de Julio Verne.
4. El tiempo entre costuras by María Dueñas is a fascinating story of a seamstress who realizes that being a man’s appendage is a losing strategy in life and learns to be self-sufficient as the Spanish Civil War rages on. The novel exists in an English translation.
Have you read anything good in Spanish recently?
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