Clubes de Lectura de la Biblioteca de Ávila

“Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.” ““Hope”, he said. “Damn thing never leaves you alone.”” “In the morning when the Sun returns. It’s possible for us to hope.” In this dystopian, speculative novel, we see the world through the lens of Klara, an Artificial Friend specially designed to take care of teenagers. Her child-like curiosity about the world and its inhabitants makes us wonder about what makes us human and unique. Set in a world intentionally vague (it could be anytime, anywhere) Ishiguro invites us to think about Artificial Intelligence, gene-editing, mass redundancies, loneliness, faith, and hope. Klara begins her days in a store with another android, Rosa, her friend, and Manager, a kind of mother figure. Through the window she observes how the humans interact and tries to learn their ways, always paying attention to the comings and goings of the Sun, a god-like...

“… why some fleeting, random moments persist in memory while other, supposedly more important moments vanish forever. …flotsam from the unvanished but long vanished past” “If the story turns out to be so astounding and so powerful that your jaw drops open and you feel that it has changed or enhanced or deepened your understanding of the world, does it matter if the story is true or not?” Paul Auster’s last novel is moving, upsetting and open ended; it leaves you wondering about nothing and everything and with the feeling of having just read an obituary. It talks about life, death and fate, about getting old and above all, about how we deal with grief and how our minds think and create the narrative of our lives, present and past. Why do we remember some things and not others? How can fiction help so much with reality? Do we remember real memories, or do we create them? These and other similar questions aren’t answered in Auster’s intimate novel. You must think the answer yourself. The ...

“She cannot work with needle and thread-her fingers become stiff and strange to her. Paint is what she loves best, and chalk, and ink. She turns the hoop over and inspects the underside. She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the “wrong” side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.” “She is a different person from yesterday … She has changed her shape, shed her skin, been painted over, or remade in a new form.” While reading Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” Maggie O’Farrell realised how quiet the Duchess was and decided to give her voice. Looking at her portrait, by Alessandro Allori, she resolved to write a novel where the narrator and the protagonist seem to intermingle. And that is what we get in The Marriage Portrait, Lucrezia De Medici’s thoughts, dreams, and nightmares, and above...

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.” “Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.” “It would have been better for her not to have such a heart. Yes, but worse for the rest of us.” Books, letters, notes, they all connect people. It only took one second-hand book by Charles Lamb for Dawsey to pen a letter to Juliet (its previous owner), a letter that would begin a flow of correspondence from Guernsey to London and back.  Books were also the reason why a group of neighbours (who had made up a literary society to fool the Germans invading their island) became the best of friends by arguing and discussing about their favourite authors. When nearly everything has been taken from you: food, wood, children, pets, radios… literature, in all its shapes, is what keeps you sane and in touch with your humanity.   Thanks to this multiple perspective narration we get to know what happened, even though in a fi...

“Womanhood was a dangerous business if you didn’t get it right.” “History or love. One must win... But we can do better than letting history win out over love.” “The Mermaid of Black Conch” is no fairy tale, even though the title may suggest so. It’s a poignant exploration of love, sex, power, loneliness, language, and the impact of outsiders on a close-knit community. Written in Creole English (we had to use a Caribbean dictionary to get the meaning of a few words) the novel shifts between different times and voices using a mixture of forms: poetry for the mermaid (Aycaya), journal entries for the fisherman (David) who falls in love with her, and an omniscient narrator who permeates the other characters’ thoughts. Oppression can take different shapes but it’s always “feelings of being insecure that make someone want to take from others.” Both female protagonists have been cursed, one by jealous women and the other by history, and only love and speech can make them free. LRB Critical p...

“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” “I believe you into being… I tell, therefore you are.” Described as a dystopian novel by the critics and as speculative fiction by its author, this well-known controversial novel acts as a cautionary tale; Margaret Atwood’s only rule while writing it and later making the series was: “not [to] include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist”. All the unimaginable things that happen in this tale have precedents in history: the Indian system of castes, religious fundamentalism, the Berlin wall, human trafficking, Puritanism, dictatorships, civil wars, the Internet... you name it. Plenty of reasons to be afraid; our way of living could easily end in a suffocating and puritan Republic such as Gilead, justifying its actions in any given tale. Be aware, stop ignoring, let’s change our story/history, let’s give i...

“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.” “Any place you love is the world to you” In these three different collections of stories ( The Happy Prince , 1888, The House of Pomegranate and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories , 1891) we find Wilde experimenting with several styles and aesthetics but always true to himself and his principles; some of these tales have been considered for children but they deal with very adult questions; others are known as parodies of other genres ( Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and The Canterville Ghost ) but criticise harshly the society Wilde lived in; some sound like fairy tales but with much more humour and always keeping his poetic style; while reading the tales in The House of Pomegranate you feel as if you were reading parables from The Bible or The Thousand and One Nights with all their structural repetitions, similes, personifications and use of archaic pronouns. All these stories analyse human vices and virtues. They do not moral...