‘From a strange world’ brings together 13 stories where there are Martians, there are dead, there is blood and at the same time there is a lot of life.
Death, love and lust converge in the same universe of strangeness set by the writer As long as Rodríguez cardboard, who in the midst of moments marked by uncertainty, pain and crisis gave birth to a new book which he baptized as From a rare world.
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The author indicates that it is a meeting of thirteen stories, of which eleven were written last year, and two other writings come from other of her books. “The rest is a new material and that aims a little to explore this moment of Guayaquil after the pandemic, where there is a lot of presence of dead bodies, but there is also a lot of presence of life”, Rodríguez says.
“I did not want to make a book that would be gloomy, but I wanted somehow to have some hope, that the stories, although they are dark, give you that hope”, Add.
He maintains that with his work he remembers that the belief in myth, ritual, and the supernatural always comes out at a certain moment. “That possibility seems very nice to me, because civility is not such. We are actually those beings looking for fire in the middle of a dark night ”, claims.
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For Rodríguez the night is life and telling it through the genre of the story is more than successful. “I am a natural storyteller … I think the story is a very natural and very precious genre, which has always served as an archive to transmit information”, express.
His stories include references to national writers, what Rodríguez calls “local winks.” For example, in your writing A poetic presents a writer who begins to have dialogues in the spirit of Cesar Davila Andrade. “I am fascinated by his handling of language, his criticism, his endings”, He points to one of the greatest representatives of the Ecuadorian short story.
Through this story Rodríguez returns to the origins and the concept of traditions. “A writer cannot completely detach himself from his past, he cannot say that he is completely authentic, because there is an approach here about inventing tradition, inventing being Ecuadorian. The obsessive question that we have asked ourselves in our literature is who we are, where are we going, is this national enough or not national enough”, dice.
A nod and tribute to the iconic writer Alicía Yanez Cossio is also present in his story An unforgettable light, where an elderly woman falls in love with a Martian. And it is that the stories that have love as a common thread were written during the pandemic as an incentive. “Trying that death does not devour everything I thought, I precisely sought to create a counterpoint in this work so that the writing would be less terrible, because I did not want to think about horror”, Rodríguez says.
In another of his stories, on the other hand, he detaches himself from the horror genre, but without stopping talking about something that is undoubtedly horror, such as femicides. Through the character of a journalist named Lisandra Guerra, she takes a journey through thirty years of bloodiest crimes. “It makes you understand how fragile women have been, how we have been victims of many things”Rodríguez mentions.
See his work as a possible example of resilience. “Literature is a tool for self-exploration … I did not want my readers to feel that everything was lost (…) I do not imagine that my literature is going to be an unfathomable well of cruelty, that does not interest me”, says the writer, who dedicates her book to her father, who “now levitates.”
At the same time, Rodríguez sees his book as a representation of that Guayaquil spirit that does not stop moving its hips in the midst of chaos. “Definitely for Guayaquil residents the presence of the pandemic and death is a before and after. Maybe we don’t quite understand it because the Guayaquil native is very resilient, just as he dies he enjoys it. It is inexplicable, I think it is a psychological condition to be from Guayaquil, but we live between violence and death dancing as if nothing had happened ”.
From a rare world comes under the seal editorial Inlimbo, from Spain. In Ecuador it will be available from November 15 at Tolstoy bookstore, La madriguera and at Casa Morada. (I)
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
