Drawing with words the silhouette of the hole

Literature serves to identify and delimit the inner and outer holes, to draw the silhouette around them, and, as we know and assimilate them, to jump into them, or to try to fill them; it serves to move and move them.

In fact, two books that have been presented successively on this third day of the Durango Fair in the Ahotsenea Literature space, Silueta , by Harkaitz Cano, and Dena zulo bera zen , by Eider Rodriguez (both published by the Susa House), have a gap as a source and, by the way, almost a single link between them.

The silhouette is embodied in 31 invented literary reviews of a book that has never been written before, namely a hole, and the collection of six stories by Eider Rodriguez, intimate but shared holes that force us to cover up the simulated normality that we call life today and here.

As he explained in today's presentation, answering the writer Beñat Sarasola's questions, Cano came up with the idea 15 years ago: he was going to get criticism of a book that didn't exist and never existed, in a book (there was a precedent, Stanislaw Lemen's Perfect Void (again in the void) for the word), but he needed a thematic support that would help maintain the level of genius idea.

On these supports, therefore, Cano has written the 31 criticisms of a novel that he never sketched out, as much as Lauaxeta's Bide barrijareceived, to compose a "novel trap" that he has written with pleasure  ("I've had a good time writing," he explained) and to disseminate in it "a catalogue of ideas about literature." 

It was all the same hole.

If there is a subordinate format in this catalogue of literature, it is that of stories (including theatre and poetry, in the shadow of the omnipotent novel), but Eider Rodriguez has proclaimed himself a storyteller in today's presentation.

"I claim storytelling with a small desire for resistance. It's a genre that's out of the magnifying glass in literary instances, but it allows me to talk about more things than novels, for example," explains the Errenterian writer to journalist and writer Iñigo Astiz. 

Thesix tales that were all the same hole are precise but moving artifacts to talk about "what is happening here and now," and show "things that are not shown, truths, worries, contradictions," consistent with a certain way of being in literature and the world.

"In the holes, in the holes, in the scars, what we are is what we are," said Rodriguez, adding, "We go on and ignore it every day, as if we don't see the cracks. But literature is a counterweight to these inertia." 

Literature draws us the silhouette of the hole; it is our job to look inside, regardless of whether we complete it, if only to see how dark it is.