¡Hola a tod@s!
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| Entre dos grandes críticos: Clive Carthew izqda. y Gabi Gómez dcha. Magnífica escultura de bronce "El Zulo" (Cartagena) en homenaje al 11m. de Victor Ochoa. Hombre desnudo, interiorizado, reflexionando... |
Os invito a leer la espléndida y profunda crítica que el escritor y dramaturgo inglés Clive Carthew ha realizado sobre mi última novela. Espero que os guste y os anime a su lectura. (For all of you, and especially for my english readers and friends I leave here the splendid and deep critique that the english writer and playwright Clive Carthew has made on my last novel. Hope you like it and encourage its reading).
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Novel Title: ¨Yámana,
Tierra de Fuego¨
by Emi Zanón
Carena Editors
In
all, this is a splendid read. Having passed the first twenty pages or so, I
found it difficult to put down. The story carried me on; the mystery intrigued
me and the romanticism of the Epilogue was most happily inevitable.
However,
I am still wondering whether I have read a love story, a biography, a
travelogue, a mystery novel or an anthropological study…or perhaps all of
these...and something more.
Yes,
something more...because it is not just a satisfying story engagingly developed
and described. It seems also a way of reminding us of the two classical or
fundamental ways of looking at the world. One is to look around us, exploring,
investigating, and explaining with pragmatic, Aristotelian detachment all we
see. The other way is to follow the teaching and perspective of Plato. This
asks of us an honest introspection and audit of our emotional intelligence
which carefully considers our feelings, reactions and our treatment of the
other or of all others.
In
Yámana, Emi chooses an anthropologist to give life to these two approaches; I
think not by accident. An anthropologist is a scientist, but he is a more
precisely a social scientist,; that is, a man who studies and records
behaviours and ways of life. He thus uses a sapiential, empirical approach to
measure and record what he sees, but he also adopts intuitional and emotional
approaches to capture how he reacts and what he feels. As we follow the life of the
anthropologist, Krystov Wazyk, Emi introduces many challenging but satisfying juxtapositions of
these two approaches. For example, the contrast between intuition - or what
Gabriel García Márquez perhaps means by his phrase “ la extrasensorialidad
presente” (perceptions without accompanying feelings) - and empiricism (pp.114.)
Another juxtaposition is that between particularly the Nobel Peace and Humanism prizes, and their funding by a fortune made
from the scientific invention of deadly dynamite; then there is Darwin´s theory
of evolution by natural selection versus ¨assisted evolution¨ or creationism.
(33, 66): and also the lengthy travel by boat to the Tierra del Fuego at the
beginning of the story and making the same journey by aeroplane at the story´s
end.
The
novel cointains much more, including magic and mysticism, apocalypticism
leading to renewal, and the importance of believing in the Here and Now. At its
conclusion, each reader is left to decide
- Aristotle or Plato, science or
senses, logic or love. What I have decided is that Yámana is a wonderful story
which presents its every reader with an important challenge.
February, 2016
Clive Carthew
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