BOOK REVIEW IN THE FOREST Author: Ana María Matute | Elena Odriozola From the reader report by: Margareth Santos En el bosque is a jewel: it consists of a box that includes an illustrated notebook that reproduces fragments of Ana María Matute’s speech when she joined the Real Academia Española in 1998, and nine illustrated cards. The artifact retraces the author’s journey started 40 years before her speech, at the age of 16, when Matute won the Planet Prize for stories. Committed to a reading of childhood, she has trodden a fruitful path in Spanish and world literary historiography, having her work translated into several languages. Some of this commitment is observed in the forest (bosque) of the title, where layers of meaning are combined: there is the physical forest with all its colors, shapes, and smells, but that also shows itself as a free territory for imagination, made of real and imaginary beings, capable of triggering countless visions and stories. This wealth of perspectives is present both in Matute’s writing and in the physical and imagetic construction of the book, which allies the fragments of her speech with nine illustrations in the form of giant playing cards, created by Elena Odriozola. This proposal of cards dates back to the 19th century, in the so-called “Mioramas”, a word coined to refer to illustrated card games whose theme referred to different landscapes, so that the reader could create his or her own landscape, in a matching of intellectual and imagetic game. There is no doubt that En el bosque raises this nineteenth-century idea to an infinite aesthetic and narrative power, for by manipulating its cards, the reader of any age can match thousands of stories, as magic and beauty are not limited to a specific age group. And this is proven by this warm, tactile, charming, and must-read work.
PUBLISHED IN NEW SPANISH BOOKS BR
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