Roth, Austen, Kafka: little books to begin with the good authors | Culture | EUROtoday

In 2003, open microphones captured how economist Jordi Sevilla informed the then opposition chief José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero who would clarify abstruse financial points “in two afternoons.” It was a extremely popular anecdote, and, by the best way, in 2011 Seville threw irony and revealed a e-book entitled The economic system in two afternoons (Deusto).

The author Sergio del Molino jokes with which this anecdote, current in some conversations between associates, might have been the germ of the brand new assortment he runs in Editorial Alliance. “We thought it would be great for someone to explain to Dostoevski in two afternoons and that it would be wonderful that someone was a passionate reader, to transmit your passion and offer you an entrance port.” The marvel has labored within the type of small books, round 100 pages, Pocket format, the place writers of the current inform their hitch with lifeless writers (and belonging to the Alliance catalog).

In the primary batch of the gathering Two afternoons with …Del Molino writes about Joseph Roth, Espido Freire about Jane Austen and Manuel Vilas about Franz Kafka. These are small, shut, non -academic essays, which search to be a part of full regulation of the work of the reviewers.

“It’s no surprise that I had to write about Jane Austen, I’ve been talking about her for 20 years,” says Freire. “In fact I would have offended me if it hadn’t been so,” he jokes. Austen is a properly -known author (and really tailored to the cinema), however not so learn, particularly among the many male viewers: the Jane Austen Museum House has been proposed for this 12 months, when 250 of its delivery are fulfilled, to make it attain extra gents. Austen goes past the loving within the interval of the regency, the place it appears pigeed, and shows a outstanding satire and irony, amongst different facets that often overlook.

“The key to its modernity is that if you forget the high waist dresses and the mannerisms of the time, you are currently the same: the impossibility of being the same due to social pressure, the need to maintain the forms when your heart or your head work in a different way … or the absolute prevalence of stupidity,” says Freire. In his e-book, by chapters, he dissects the various janes That there have been in Austen: the woman, the reader, the one, the wandering or, after all, the author.

Vilas’s relationship with Franz Kafka additionally has love dyes. “I’m not a Kafka reader, I’m his crush,” he says. Kafka is the author who made him wish to be a author and since his studying started he has by no means left that “black hole.” On the event of this essay he has had the chance to learn it entire, who is aware of, maybe for the final time. How to handle this obsession, particularly taking into consideration every part that has been mentioned and written about Praguense? Well, by means of a dictionary, however during which every entry, greater than a definition, gives a private imaginative and prescient. Some entries: absurd, Max Brod, officers, Okay, Milena Jlesenská and even Madrid (as a result of an uncle from Kafka lived in Madrid, as a driver’s director).

Vilas says that Kafka’s work is “stainless” and that it stays fully in drive. “Kafka is behind Putin’s brain and Trump’s brain, artificial intelligence, anguish before the bureaucracy. When we feel persecuted by the State, or by the administration, or by the Treasury, or by the neighbor, is Kafka behind. Everyone who feels guilty without knowing why, has Kafka behind.” And he likes to elucidate it extra expressively, within the pure Vilas fashion: “Kafka is to literature what Elvis is popular culture and Messi to football.”

Joseph Roth’s alcoholism

Sergio del Molino has additionally adopted a private strategy when addressing Joseph Roth, an creator who was already grownup, who had nothing to do on the delivery of his vocation, however whose presence has been rising increasingly more. He considers him one thing like a prophet of the Holocaust: he died alcoholized in Paris in 1939, with out seeing World War II or the extermination of the Jewish individuals. “He was born in Galitzia, a region where the Jews predominated and where there are no longer Jews: Roth knew that this was going to happen and said it again and again,” says Del Molino. His identification was diffuse: Galitzia was a part of the Austro -Hungarian Empire, right this moment Ukraine, however he did not know the place Roth was, by his personal errance and for the turbulent geopolitical modifications of his time.

“So diffuse was his identity that when he died they had to call a rabbi and a priest to make two ceremonies, because no one knew well which one corresponded,” says Del Molino. But behind that blurred identification, the author discovered a robust thread to throw: his alcoholism. “I think that Rsth was a drunk, an alcoholic who never denied his alcoholism, although his friends tried many times to leave the drink,” he says. That doesn’t imply that Roth was not conscious of his downside. “There are many traces in his literature that he was aware of how alcohol razed him. But he could not depart: he had a love relationship with his addiction and that marks his literature.” And that’s the mode that has discovered the mill of explaining its ardour for Roth. And in simply two afternoons.