It's only been five!

And it's already June. And I must confess, I am reading "El Asedio", the latest novel by Don Arturo Perez-Reverte, my all-time favorite writer, so it might go even slower... Anyway, I've decided to come up with my personal rankings as of now, and here they are for you to disagree with:

1. Hemingway
2. Solzhenitsyn
3. Camus
4. Faulkner
5. Neruda

I'll update it when I get to 10.

Nice to meet you, Mr. Hemingway.

Alright, I’ll admit it: I’d never read Hemingway. But back off, I’m sure you’ve never read Quevedo or Gongora.


So I started reading “The old man and the sea” this past Saturday and finished on Sunday, couldn’t put it down. The narrative is so vivid that I recall passages of the book as if they were memories, instead of my imagination. I don’t know what Hemingway’s point was when he wrote it, but to me it represented –however grandiose it may sound- the triumph of the human spirit over adversity and how all noble effort is good in itself. If I evaluate the story as an accountant, he ran a tremendous loss, in fact, he’s a complete failure, but only because what he gained in self-respect (and from others) is intangible and cannot be measured in dollars and cents. It’s an excellent read, one of my favorites as of yet. I heartily recommend it.

It’s now turn Mr. Halldór Laxness, Icelandic, who won it in 1955.

I despise Anse Bundren.

He’s not a man. He’s a weasel. I took up “As I lay dying” again and ended up disgusted with this wretch of a man. I will say that you should read this book because whenever a character can inspire such strong feelings in you it means that the book is good. By that standard, this book is superb. I won’t tell you why I hate him so you can read it yourself and come to hate him as much as I do, which I’m sure you will.


The book was also my introduction to the stream-of-consciousness style and while it’s hard to follow at times it’s also fascinating: “- My mother is a fish. Darl is my brother. Jewel’s mother is a horse. My mother is a fish.” Peppered in between are real issues that will leave you pondering, like “Is he really crazy or do we call someone crazy when he doesn’t think like everybody else?” The value of a promise, of life, material things… all are covered and played out through the almost Dantesque journey.

I strongly recommend you read this book. Besides, if you’re American, you have to. You just have to.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

All of Camus’ writings should start with that disclaimer. By the way, I hate it when people quote “Dante’s Inferno” because there is no such thing, so for the record, I am quoting “The Divine Comedy” which happens to be split in three: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The fact that some editor decided that people didn’t really care about Purgatory and Heaven and published the Hell section separately does not a stand-alone book make. In fact, you don’t get to the best part. Anyway, Dante is not a Nobel Prize Laureate, so enough about him.


I ended up reading more than one of Camus’ books, since I have a collection of his works. As I mentioned before, I read “The Plague” followed by “The Fall” and continuing with “Exile and The Kingdom”. It’s always the same story with different characters and set in different places, so don’t bother. His message always is “There’s no hope in life. All you can aspire to is death”. If you read reviews about him they’ll say things like “insightful” and “shows the greatest understanding of the human mind”, but I personally don’t know where they get that from, unless all the critics are as limited in vision as he is and fail to grasp that life does have a meaning. Even if you were to take the supernatural out of the equation, Wouldn’t you say that helping others and making them happier, devoting yourself to service, could be deemed to be the meaning of life? I read once that the Greek Hedonists became more stoic than the Stoics, because in due time they came to realize that the only true pleasures were those of the spirit, and sometimes I think that people like Camus just didn’t have enough time to come to the same conclusion. I don’t know if he might have, but he did die before he was 40.

If you start reading one of his books, it will suck you in, I assure you. His narrative is powerful. He’ll have you flying high just to drop you suddenly and without warning into a pit of despair and hopelessness. If you’re curious read one and you’ll know how all his books end.