Literature is like a magic carpet, one that we can use at any time to cross the clouds, sneak through the holes of the world and its history, to immerse ourselves in the intimacy of a character miles from our own chaise longue summery. The next review called 5 books for 5 continents proposes a global journey through which to marvel at the world of letters and understand the reality of this and other times.
The Diary of Anne Frank (Europe)
Out of innocence and fear can emerge the most terrifying truths in the world. If you also dare to translate them into a book, the result becomes a unique testimony for future generations when it comes to making them aware of the mistakes that humans should not make again. Refugee in the warehouse of an Amsterdam building fleeing from the Nazis with her family, the Jewish girl Anna Frank, barely 13 years old, he recorded his own fears, those of an entire continent.
Everything falls apart, from Chinua Achebe (Africa)
Before the arrival of the white man, Africa was something similar to another dimension, neither better nor worse, but different. A place where men lived with a magic that did not need other gods, where the land was collected and spirituality governed the lives of their subjects, their dances and rituals, their ethical codes and their ancestral traditions. Until the white man and a few pinches of manipulation arrived. Achebe, a native of Nigeria, where he located the fictional town of Umuofia, knew better than few other writers of his time the many faces of colonialism on the world's largest continent.
The Thousand and One Nights (Asia)
When a manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights sneaked into Europe in the XNUMXth century (they had been compiled ten centuries earlier), the Western world was in disbelief at the freshness of all those stories told to a bloody sultan by Scheherazade, possibly the most famous storyteller in literature. Composed of magic carpets, geniuses in lamps, ambitious merchants and islands that moved from place to place, The Thousand and One Nights continues to evoke an exotic and suggestive world where narratives from India, Persia, Iran, Egypt and even China fit.
Tierra Ignota, by Patrick White (Oceania)
Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, Patrick White defined the history of his Australian country like few others in Uncharted Land, a work that encompasses an expedition begun in 1845 from Sydney through the eyes of Voss, a German explorer who commanded a journey through aboriginal lands where no one still knows the white man. The masterpiece of the one considered by The New York Times as «most important figure in Australian fiction»Perfectly defines an era and a continent forged by hundreds of contrasts.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez (America)
If there is a novel capable of turning a continent into a metaphor, specifically Latin America, One Hundred Years of Solitude is possibly the most suitable work. Because in addition to the family intrigues of the Buendía, Gabo's novel was a testimony of the magic realism of Colombia, the economic dominance of the United States and the evolution of the peoples of the Third World. Also that of a universe that would define the so-called Latin American boom, leading all the cultural circles of the world to turn their gaze towards the land of Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa or Isabel Allende.
What would your 5 books be for 5 continents?
Within my limitations I can choose from America another Gabo book, but in this one he talks about love as few writers have done. "Love in the times of cholera". A great love that has no borders, neither of years, nor of spaces. Within a Colombia plagued by revolutions, like many of the other Latin American countries. An eternal and unique love. here the magic is within the description of the feelings of the characters.
For Europe I choose Kafka and Camus. The clear narrative in The Metamorphosis for example and the philosophy of Camus abroad.