Periodical


Adriana Villanueva writes about a new book by Alberto Barrera Tyszka and Cristina Marcano in yesterday's El Nacional. Her column a reader's version of the city.

Weekend reading newspapers fiction. Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez writes a book for exile. Venezolanidad as migration (even if played out as a farce), departure transforming the initial city, a thousand versions. From La Carlota airport in 1982 or in this novel's late 1990s, international prose if it makes Caracas from an airplane's arc.

El libro de Esther takes two sides of the Atlantic as continuous, the narrator landing at night in Tenerife, through a lightning storm. Hyper-conscious of being an exile narrative, under the guise of improvised travelling, already written as it happens, cinematic pacing to quick chapters. Writing a version of the 1990s outside Venezuela, watching it change or recede. The city as its own country dispersed into thousands.

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"Everybody likes it when the casual drift
becomes more insistent, setting in order the house
while writing finis to its three-decker novel."

(John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander, Ecco, 2005)