Paperweight: Tilsa Otta’s new book and two other recommended readings for the week

Author: Chantal Akerman

Memories

Pages: 178

Publisher: Zindo & Gafuri

Mainly recognized as a filmmaker, thanks to films such as “Jeanne Dielman” (1975) or “La captive” (2000), the Belgian Chantal Akerman transfers in these books the themes that obsessed her: the daily life of women, desire, depression, feminism and more. She does it through an unscrupulous look at her relationship with her elderly mother, and in that sense it is related to the documentary “No Home Movie”, her last film, which was also an intimate family portrait. and painful.

Because as Akerman recounts his experiences, he uses his mother’s character at all times as an inverse figure to his own. “He liked to see me laugh and I gave him the opposite,” she writes in a certain passage, while constantly reflecting on the sadness and suffering of being trapped in the painful task of caring for the fragile body of the woman who gave her life. A burden that, of course, also fills her with guilt: should a daughter complain about having to care for her sick mother? Or does she just have to hold it back?

To the mother-child bond that predominates in the book, Akerman adds other experiences, such as her turbulent love affair with a girl 30 years younger than her, or her constant struggle against mental illness. All in all, it is a book of heartbreaking beauty, which can be read as a foretaste of the inevitable tragedy: shortly after publication, Akerman’s mother died; and months later the filmmaker herself would end up committing suicide in Paris.

Author: Tilsa Otta

Newspaper

Pages: 70

Publisher: The Balance

It goes from December 1 to 31, with one entry per day, as a personal diary. The curious thing is that each of these 31 texts have been written by a different person, almost blindly, with just a few references to try to make it read as the work of a single character.

The idea for this game came from the Peruvian writer Tilsa Otta, who proposed to 31 poets from different countries that they send her a free fragment, but written in the voice of a character named F. In addition, she added some signs such as “if she speaks of a girlfriend, wife, etc., her name will be Isabel” or “if you are talking about your pet, your name will be Bernardo”.

Like any collective project of any kind, the result is quite irregular. But its grace lies not so much in the finished set (which has weak moments, and others enigmatic and even illuminating), but rather in the playful procedure that refers a bit to the “exquisite corpse” explored by the surrealists or to the experimentations of the OuLiPo group. , among other literary adventures. Taken from that perspective, it becomes quite enjoyable.

The book is presented this Thursday, February 17, at 7 pm via Facebook Live: https://bit.ly/34QLvdc

Author: Renso Gonzales

Fanzine

Pages: 16

Publisher: independent

Sheathed in his scare virus jumpsuit, the illustrator Renso Gonzales has made this fanzine that records various daily scenes of the pandemic. He does it without grandiloquent intentions, at ground level, observing the character next door as an equal: the tension due to a possible contagion within public transport, the mistrust due to the use of the mask, the pressure generated on mental health, and even the terrible conditions that COVID-19 generated in the least favored groups.

As Sandra Suazo points out in the introductory text, “each vignette implies a look from the position of fear, to a threat, from contradiction as well; but a look that does not stop expressing itself, that finds in the line a kind of cathartic outlet, an anchor against anxiety, sadness and anger”. And, indeed, Gonzales’s chronicles question us because they speak of a reality that we have not yet overcome and that may have come to stay forever.