Mudar de piel
Shedding Skin | Anagrama, 2018
Much as the storytellers in this hypothetical scenario would find themselves adopting a similar tone thanks to the subject matter or backdrop, the nine stories assembled in this book draw on a common language to weave a highly unorthodox tapestry of what lies beneath the affections. While some are conventional stories, other straddle the borders of genre to emerge as veritable bonsai novels, yet all nine tales, bound by the subtlest of echoes, contain within them the desire to strip reality to its bare bones to reveal it just as it might appear in a brief flash of insight.
With the incisiveness and keenness of vision that are the hallmarks of his work, Marcos Giralt Torrente once again delves deep into family relations, displaying a tremendous knack for portraying the (occasionally contradictory) inner worlds of characters brought face to face with their fears and desires. Feckless fathers, flighty mothers, adolescents taking their first faltering steps in the adult world, complicit children, siblings bound by ties that are hard to break, ominous shadows, irreparable absences, flawed loves and, in general, the slowly emerging jigsaw of life’s complexities to which we are exposed when living side by side with our nearest and dearest.
Free from melodrama yet unflinching, with a detached and yet compassionate gaze, at all times accompanied by a virtuoso prose style and a keen eye for shifting tones and nuance, the author explores the inner workings of intimacy and the cracks it revels to offer nine outstanding stories.
«The limpid and beautiful prose of these stories is a kind of enchantment that glides over bonds woven with fragile threads, spider webs hanging over vertiginous solitudes.» Mariana Enríquez
«A book that teaches how to live.» Elena Poniatowksa
«Fortunately we still have authors who avoid appeasing or simplification in order to explain the world. Authors who look, understand, invent and don’t judge. Authors such as Guadalupe Nettel, Fleur Jaeggy or Marcos Giralt (...) This dangerous literary device is written with high quality and precise prose. Refusing any melodramatic pornography as well as theatrical punch lines (...) it leaves the reader feeling uncomfortable, devastated, lucid and entangled in the skein that Giralt Torrente has woven.» Carlos Zanón, El País
«A book with a silky texture, elegantly presenting the many broken fabrics of all lives.» Antonio Iturbe, Mercurio
«Just like Ishiguro, Giralt makes you feel unconfortable, he desacralizes and goes beyond faith and moral… Always disturbing. The author is a genius, a rising star, a writer that teaches some important lessons about perception, not sanctimoniously but with great poetic and evocative strenght.» Ángeles López, El Cultural
«One of the most unique voices of the Spanish narrative in the last decades.» Matías Néspolo, El Mundo
«Marcos Giralt Torrente proves in these narrative pieces his great talent and his well-known sensitibility to describe complex feelings.» Iñaki Ezkerra. El Correo Español
«The strength of these excellent stories lies in their exploration of states of mind, in the persistence of the past, and the characters’ perception of the present. This book is proof of a gifted and demanding writer.» Domingo Ródenas de Moya, El Periódico
«There are no recipes to cure the pain, not even strips, but only the obversation of what is happening with an elegant and underline-ness style. A light prose to talk about issues that can weight like slabs, and sink lifes.» Antonio Iturbe, Librújula
“An intense example of a primordial wound turned into fiction.” Maribel Marín Yarza, El País
Bulgaria: Perseus
