Lectures i divagacions

The Road Cormac McCarthy, 2006 Vintage, ebook The Road is the chronicle of the journey of a father and his son, but forget the typical road novel. We are in an undetermined future in a post-apocalyptic world; all signs of civilization had been burnt down to the basis by an undefined catastrophe. In this world, the man and his son travel south, without any final destination; they just hope that things will be better in the south. They have to spend most of their time looking for stores to avoid them from starving to death. If that wasn't bad enough, they also have to keep themselves save, because as world has been reduced to a gray amount of debris and ashes, humanity has gone back to the ages when men ate each other. The Road is a fascinating novel. It is deeply hopeless, because we face a world on which life has almost disappeared and just a few men and woman have survived and are engaged in a permanent struggle for surviving. The man and the boy just keep walking south...

El Laberinto de las aceitunas Eduardo Mendoza, 1982 Booket, 320 pàgines Un intern d'un psiquiàtric barcelonès és segrestat per la policia amb la intenció d'acomplir amb un alt deure per l'estat. Aquesta operació, en principi simple i sense gaire risc aparent, fracassarà de manera estrepitosa, i el nostre protagonista es veurà embolicat en una obscura conxorxa entre gent de la faràndula, policies incompetents i empresaris peculiars que es resoldrà de forma inesperada. Sense dubte, Eduardo Mendoza és el gran mestre de la novel·la d'humor espanyola, fet que demostren obres com la que ens ocupa i altres com l'esplèndida Sin noticias de Gurb . És un gènere que l'autor ha conreat més recentment en novel·les com El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato . Personalment, crec que és molt millor en aquesta vessant que en altres tipus de novel·les, com pugui ser La ciudad de los prodigios , que sense que sigui una novel·la de segon ordre no em va semblar tant bona en ...

If The Dead Rise Not Philip Kerr, 2009 Quercus, ebook kindle Berlin, 1934. Bernie Gunther is working as a house detective at the Adlon hotel. Hedda Adlon, the wife of the hotel owner, asks him a special favor: help Noreen Charalambides, an American journalist friend of her, to investigate the real situation of Jew population in Germany. During this investigation, aimed to promote an American boycott to the Berlin 1934 Olympics, Bernie Gunther will discover a construction racket related to the Olympic sites that will put him on a very complicated situation, in which he will have to choose between love and life... Later on, in 1954 in the city of La Habana, he will have the opportunity to resume the life he was about to have twenty years before, but twenty years might be too much time. If The Dead Rise Not is a story that starts in the era of the Totalitarianism and ends in the era of Cold War. However, it has not a great involvement with the political situations, at least in ...