El huerto de Emerson

After the prolonged success of Lluvia fina, Luis Landero takes up the memory and readings of his particular personal universe where he left them in El Balcón en Invierno. And he does so in this memorable book, which masterfully re-braids the memories of the child in his town of Extremadura, the adolescent recently arrived in Madrid or the young man who begins to work, with stories and scenes lived in the books with the same passion and greed than in the real world. In Emerson's Orchard there are characters from a still recent time, but who seem to belong to a long time ago, and as full of life as Pache and his bowling alley in the middle of nowhere, hyperactive women who support families like Grandma and the narrator's aunt, silent men who suddenly reveal amazing secrets, or candid boyfriends like Florentino and Cipriana and their enigmatic courtship at nightfall. Landero turns all of them into pairs of the protagonists of Ulysses, congeners of the characters in the novels of Kafka or Stendhal, and in companions of the most brilliant reflections on writing and creation in a unique mixture of humor and poetry, of evocation and charm. It's hard not to feel transported into a story told by the fire.