Beasts Ronaldo Menéndez
Language of Cloth, 2006
144 pages, 15.21 €
This way one might think that this is a documentary of animals, and partly what is in that part of the that our own existence is something of a documentary of animals (we face, we are afraid of the danger and we can overcome the attack) but no, this is the name you put this review of the latest novel Ronaldo Menéndez ( Havana 1970) and rightly entitled, "The Beast."
of her gender and her "black" (there is a criminal plot, there is Cuba) stated that reminds the cinematic language. Tarantino has talked about, and it is true that the pace of the novel is exciting, the appearance of the plot In media res (A timid and sad philosophy teacher who picks up the phone to hear cross-talk assists planning by two unknown subjects of his own murder) puts the reader from page one in the cellular tissue, bleeding, dark direct action that characterizes some movies.
But there's more. We know that there's more:
is hunger, a hunger that is of a people, Cuba, "which sends its offspring victualled" for angling cats from the rooftops. A Cuba that at no time is appointed (playing dominoes in the corners) so that transcend and widespread hunger and the hunger of all oppressed peoples, and ultimately is Hunger, with a capital of one man, our Professor, Claudio Cañizares, who is also a status symbol, which will end, since its first, primitive innocence, become oppressors in "human weapon on two legs."
A philosophical and existential hunger, the hunger of a man (our professor of philosophy, Claudio Cañizares, "bland and lonely wanker) intended to undertake a PhD voraciously of Darkness, also capitalized, and that getting (pushed by their persecutors) is shoved it on the "cosmic night" that Heidegger says "needs to be exploited and braved by people who are willing to get to the bottom of the abyss."
A man who raises a pig "that machine devouring everything that is not his own body in the bathroom of his house, the symbol of the intimate site coprophagous, (we know that a man who is raising a pig in the bathroom from home, is someone who raises the most intimate crows of her womb)
Finally, a man who will challenge his counterpart is not it?; The pig, the Beast and that winner or loser, in the novel, thanks to a final surprising element, will rise as one doomed, doomed from before the whole plot was set in motion upon him, condemned to sleep for the last time as an "alligator asleep."
Where is the real enemy? Where is the threat? Question is something that page at Ronaldo Menéndez in this novel of elements that take their meaning as parts are charged to hunters, at the right time, in the right place. A heartbreaking novel, violent, disturbing light and dark, bloody, sometimes cynical, others poignant, but always, continuously, skinned as breathing rate of runners or hanged, those men who dare to cross its own appetite Hunger, appetite Nether Darkness.
