BOOK REVIEW THE BOY WHO Author: Juan Berrio From the reader report by: Margareth Santos The power of El niño que rests on its surprisingly easiness: Luís is a six-year-old boy who, when reading children’s tales or superhero stories, does not stop at the reading itself, but prefers to imagine his own stories or starts to question what he reads. And it does not take much for Luís to unleash his imagination: a word in the newspaper that his father reads attentively (to the point of not paying attention to him); an encyclopedic collection on the shelf of a grumpy uncle. Here, the boy turns the objective aridity of the encyclopedia into an amazing play of senses by establishing a new order, in which he subverts the alphabetical rigidity. The stories take place during any given summer of the 1970s, and unfold in landscapes dear to the author’s childhood: Madrid and Huesca. As Juan Berrio explains, the work unveils autobiographical components and serves as a reflection of an era, seen from a fictionalized children’s perspective that the book composes and recovers, but with no nostalgia. Fantasy and creativity play a core role in this book, and it is evident in the visual composition and the play between speech and silence: the reader has before their eyes a work that excels in working with pale colors, while passages focused on Luís’ imagination explode in colors, in direct opposition to the faded images of the surroundings or of the adult characters. Another important element are the interrogative silences of Luís in the face of adults’ orders, which are so precise as to be astonishing.
El niño que is an exceptional work, striking in its simplicity, refined in its work with colors, fun, and incredibly affective, to the point that any reader can come to rescue the Luís that exists within them. And this is no mere self-help slogan.
PUBLISHED IN NEW SPANISH BOOKS BR
114 · |
