Saturday, April 24, 2010

La Loca de La Casa by Rosa Montero

Three words: Read this NOW.

If you love literature, if you have ANYTHING to do with literature: as a reader, as a writer, as an editor, as someone who writes about writers, this book is highly recommended.

Part autobiography, part essay, part fiction, this book has enough twists and turns to get you hooked. I mean, it is not a novel, and yet you can’t put it down until you finish it.



Montero mixes parts of her own story (although you never know what, if anything, of what she is telling you is true), with the biography of great authors like Tolstoi, Stevenson, Marquez, Mary Shelley, Austen, and others, to speak about the act of writing, the act of reading, and the imagination that is necessary to do both things.

I can’t tell you how many times during the book I’ve (literally) cried out “Yes! That happens to me too!” Montero explains to us the passion for reading, she tells us why some writers never get around to writing their best work, she describes the fears of someone with too much imagination, the fickleness of memory, the uncertainty of reality, the difficulty that women authors face—and all of this with enough wit to make Oscar Wilde proud. There is enough food for thought in this short book to feed 10.000 conversations. In fact, you can probably feed a couple hundred on each chapter alone.

It’s hard to put all the wonders of this book into words, so I’m going to list a couple of the things Rosa says:

- Why is it that when a male author writes, everyone assumes he is saying something about humanity, but when a female author writes, everyone assumes she is saying something about women? Rosa complains about those people who believe there is such a thing as “female” literature. Gender is not the only thing that influences how someone writes. For example, she believes she has more in common with a man her age, living in Madrid, and who has lived under Franco, than with a black, South African, 80-year -old woman who has lived through the apartheid.

- Rosa talks about the fear of authors. How, on some days, you feel like everything you are writing is perfect, and then, on other days, you hate all you say and think you should have chosen a different career path. She says that many times authors don’t put their best work on paper: it stays in their head. While in their imagination, the story is perfect, it is the best, most enlightening work ever written. However, once you start putting it down on paper, you know you will screw it up. No matter how much you work, it will never be perfect. The fact that a novelist has to spend the whole afternoon just writing a person leaving a room makes the work clumsy. Suddenly, your lack of talent has tainted your masterpiece—and so, it takes much resolution and character to decide to write your best work.

There is much, much more in this book. I can’t possibly describe its awesomeness. I’ll just have to repeat what I said at the start: read it!!!

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