Diarios

Second volume of the Diaries of Rafael Chirbes, which brings together various notebooks written between 2005 and 2007. These are the years of the slow gestation, full of doubts that even lead him to consider abandoning literature, of the novel that would mean his definitive consecration: Crematorium. They are also years of personal uncertainties: the definitive abandonment of his work in the writing of Sobremesa, which gives him a new freedom; of friends who die; of fleeting sexual encounters, between desire and decrepitude, because the body is no longer young; of growing disappointments... But the usual enthusiasms are still very much alive: the classic films, which bring moments of happiness, and the tireless, sagacious and varied readings: Montaigne, La Celestina, La Regenta, Baudelaire, the stories of Poe, the French Suite of Némirovsky, the diaries of Jünger, Ellroy... And also the trips to various cities: New York, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona... Always on guard, always implacable with himself and with others -there are here, for example, a severe portrait of Juan Goytisolo, with whom he meets again in Berlin-, always avoiding literary circles, commonplaces and banality, he expresses forceful opinions against what he contemptuously calls "high expression literature", loaded with winks and literary references, and against not a few current writers, whom he reads with indifference and sometimes with indignation. However, the devastating Chirbes in his judgments is complemented by the ironic disenchanted capable of understanding human weaknesses, and with the writer full of doubts about his literary task: "Writing does not cure, it does not relieve, it does not remove from that fog, from that burr that is life. (...) A writer. Not the one who spends his life between words, but the one who spends his life trying to catch something that is both inside and outside of him and only allows himself to be caught by words: no, it's not exact, the words don't catch it, they reveal it".