Somebody asked me which is my favorite novel of the eight I analyze in my book, and it’s a difficult question because if I didn’t love them all, I wouldn’t subject myself to being minutely entwined with them since 2023. But if I had to choose, I’d say it’s the utterly unteanslateable Salvar el fuego by Guillermo Arriaga. And it’s solely because of the language. The narrative oscillates between parts narrated in the most brutal Mexican slang and the neoliberal corporate speak. If you love the Spanish language, you need to be reading this novel. Or better yet, listening to it on Audible because the way the actors perform it is a work of art in itself.
From the ones that have been translated, I recommend Claudia Piñeiro’s A Little Luck because its protagonist is such a perfect neoliberal bitch that I shook with rage the entire time I was writing about it.
I promise that I didn’t choose the novels that would confirm my ideas. I chose the ones that I love rereading, and decided that if my hypothesis works, it should work on any material. I could have chosen twenty other novels pretty randomly, and they’d all confirm my ideas because what I’m talking about is real.
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