Paperweight: Sigrid Nunez and her novel about death; Diana Moncada and her poems about the distance

“What is your torment”

Author: Sigrid Nunez.

Pages: 200.

Publisher: Anagrama.

As in his previous and magnificent novel “El amigo”, Nunez rounds off a story about the chiaroscuro of solitude and human company. He does it from the particular impersonality of our times, full of people in a hurry and anguished, individualists in the exercise of a false illusion of community. Despite this, it is not a cold, cynical or hopeless book.

It is centered on the story of a woman who must accompany her best friend in what seem to be her last days of life, whipped by a cancer that consumes her physically, mentally and emotionally to the point of, at times, making her seem like a person. completely different. But along with that bond between the two women, marked by the imminence of death but portrayed with sensitivity and humor, Nunez introduces us to multiple short stories broken up with an anecdotal voice, although not superficially for that. The mosaic that she composes is rich in emotions, surprises and contradictions.

“What is your torment” is also a beautiful book about illness and the passage of time, about the unspoken sadness of leaving behind a life full of missed opportunities and impossible slopes. A deep melancholy only attenuated by the irony and grace of an outstanding author.

“distant object”

Author: Diana Moncada.

Pages: 44.

Publisher: 1 time editors.

The first thing that draws attention to Moncada’s collection of poems is his sensory ability to capture stimuli with words: as if he had very dilated pupils, a hypersensitive ear or the sense of smell of a dog that sniffs the air with certainty. And so he explores the most closed night, the nuances of whiteness, and allows himself to investigate materialities and textures with delicate dexterity.

That is why he allows himself to reflect on “the glow of hunger” or contemplate a landscape without giving in to useless preciousness: “I saw the meadow and beyond the meadow, a blue, a broken chair, the factory mooing among the cows, what yellow of the field acting as a stage”.

But later in the book, the poet also begins to walk between the scope and barriers of language. Along these lines, when she deals with the enigmas of life, she can resort to mechanical or scientific jargon, expanding her lyrical possibilities and meaning in amazing and disconcerting ways.

And at the heart of the work, the idea of ​​a necessary distance in the poem itself. The detachment and separation that move the author to process everything with caution, like someone who is dazzled by the new. Or as she writes: “The language that is newly born silently observes what it will one day be able to name”.