Dioses contra microbios

It is not frequent to stray from the beaten track to address a reality as overwhelming as the Covid-19 pandemic, and that is achieved in this original work by the professor and writer Alejandro Gándara. On the one hand, it is a book written from the perplexity of the confined man who, out of place, seeks to understand with details of family life, neighbors and the city that he contemplates from the window. But above all it is a work that seeks to shift attention to "the vision that our cultural and spiritual sources, mainly but not exclusively Greek, offered before the same and often greater difficulties", a legacy that we have been forgetting. Between the Iliad and Plato, between Oedipus and the oracle at Delphi, or Achilles, Priam and Odysseus, Gándara offers flashes of luminous lucidity, as if those inaugural Greeks had intuited how to deal with such a devastating situation. The author also sprinkles the text with accurate and concise brushstrokes on the current world -from the role of the media or politicians to the contagion of an ideologized thought-, but without renouncing an intimate record, of the biopolitics that mutilates Eros , of the doubtful quality of the figures, of the quantification, as a homogenizing reflection of pain, loneliness and helplessness.