The Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi has become the sixth woman to receive the highest award in Hispanic literature. We are talking about the 2021 Cervantes Prize, endowed with 125,000 euros. Exiled in Barcelona since 1972, this week she turns 80 and has practically no genre left to try, being passionate love and exile the two great themes that run through his vast work.
In fact, as explained by the Minister of Culture when announcing the ruling, the jury highlights how the writer’s work has focused on “The condition of women and sexuality”. He also underlines that the award recognizes the “perpetual reminder of exile” that he has built.
Unfortunately, most of the books in his long bibliography are currently out of print but, while we wait for a reissue of some of them, we can still discover their universe through these five works that are still on sale.
The boat of time
The boat of time it is the most complete and complicit anthology of the poetry of Cristina Peri Rossi, which expresses the emotions, the moods, the ideas and the great myths of all time, from the Tower of Babel to Facebook and going through the most painful, most fervent conflicts and their mythicization and ironic disenchantment. It has been made by one of the best connoisseurs of his work, Lil Castagnet.
THE boat of time, Cristina Peri Rossi
I adore you and other stories
The five stories that make up I adore you and other stories suppose a masterful demonstration of the narrative talent of Cristina Peri Rossi. In them, Patricia’s days are too similar to each other: work, motherhood, loneliness. However, one morning a novel easy opener has complicated his routine, and sparked a rebellion against his “Intimate disasters”. It does not matter whether the flags are red or black, “Patriotism” has as its end (and beginning) to defeat the adversary. How does a far-sighted man deal with “Judgment Day”? A therapist and his patient hold a particular “Session” of psychoanalysis worthy of the best Cortázar. Nothing is more exciting for certain mature men than a young lover who gratefully responds to his teachings: “I adore you.”
I adore you and other stories (Flash Stories)
Private rooms
If a stranger landed in one of our great cities and wanted to know how urbanites live and feel, this book would give them a subtle and ironic insight into the desires, conflicts and illusions of today’s human being. All the stories share that urban setting and its development in closed spaces: a despues de, a hotel room, a television set or an office. The small daily dramas and the search for friendship, love or sex show the most conflictive aspects of late capitalism. Our world, with its illusions and frustrations.
The Replicators
Cristina Peri Rossi writes at the beginning of the poem Camel, included in this book: “Arab poets say / that fate is the wandering of a blind camel”. The author believes that books are also like destiny and wander like those blind camels in search of readers. That’s how it is The replicants, a work that confirms the Hispanic-Uruguayan writer as one of the indispensable voices of poetry in Spanish in recent decades, but also dazzles for her imaginative and suggestive ability to delve into little-explored corners of our identity.
The Replicators (Cálamo Poetry)
Julio Cortázar and Cris
Sometimes the encounter between two great writers takes place and from that commotion arises laughter, stories, poems, letters, trips, sparkling dialogues and mutual fascination. In the last decade of their life, Julio Cortázar and Cristina Peri Rossi met and lived an intense relationship, full of complicities, humor and love, literature and seduction between two cities: Paris and Barcelona. Julio Cortázar dedicated Fifteen love poems for Cris and, many years after his death, Cris writes the chronicle of that unrepeatable love friendship. First autobiographical piece by one of the most established authors in Latin American literature.
Julio Cortázar And Cris (Keys)
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Photos | Courtesy of publishers