Oriente

The eight stories gathered here run between the everyday and the fantastic, between the real and the surreal. Thus, a quiet operatic evening at Madrid's Teatro Real becomes a confinement in which darkness reigns and there is no possibility of communicating with the outside world. In other stories, a visit to a pilot friend leads to an unexpected trip to the other side of the world, the sky of Seville is populated with marine animals and a strange guest -a nestrovich- can alter the life of a family to unsuspected limits. There is also, of course, a place for cinema, as in that story in which a producer embarks on a film about Muhammad financed by Saudi Arabia, or that other whose setting is a dark stalls where all kinds of characters come together: students who are fleeing from the police, prostitutes, jerk offs, homosexuals and the writer Azorín, a great fan of the seventh art.And the art and the need to count are also present, as in the evocation of a friend from adolescence, a math genius, who had a tragic end on a beach, or in the story that a grandmother explains to her grandson about her love affairs in Cuba, torn between two suitors.The eight pieces that make up this volume confirm the talent of Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, who years ago passed smoothly from cinema to literature and in the latter field has already given us several splendid books, to which these stories are now added.