Campo de retamas

María Moliner's dictionary defines "wreck" as "the rest of a shipwreck or what was on it". By calling his brief notes that way, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio seems to suggest that, far from aspiring to the "sententious lapidarity" of aphorisms, these texts bear witness rather to the shipwrecks of a will that -due to inconstancy, laziness, impotence, or simply because of a recalcitrant distrust towards "the stupid arrogance of conviction" - has given up the superior effort of pursuing reasoning to its ultimate consequences, settling for its single silhouette, its mere feint or fragment. The wrecks do not obey a homogeneous formula: they mix reflections, essay sketches, memories, comments, epigrams, charms, apologists, poems... Weightless by nature, they allow one to delve into Ferlosio's main obsessions without difficulty, unfolding in a panoply of records that goes from humor to lyricism, from indignation to irony, from the conclusive to the speculative.