¿Cuáles son los libros que debe leer antes de morir?

0:06 I' m Roberto Pombo. Welcome to my questions, a half- hurry program sponsored by KFAM theater. Much more than theater in the world. There are thousands, if not millions, of definitive or necessary lists of books that we must read throughout our lives. And as the international Bogotá Book Fair has already begun, it brings you my recommendations from the books that I think should be read. It is good not to read the classics of literature in adolescence. For this chapter we spoke with the writer Gabriel Idiartio, with the writer Catarina Navas, with the writer Juan Esteban Constantin, with the writer Vegae Vidal and with the writer Daniel Samperro I am Roberto Pombo. And this is chapter eighty- four of my questions. The history of humanity is full of human events that marked destiny forever. From his arbors, the human sought a way to suffer less in his quest for survival. Then there are inventions that are hypnotized in evolution, such as the wheel in approximately the year three thousand two hundred BC, or the use of weapons as swords and knives spears about five hundred zero years ago. Let' s not talk about fire here, because it already existed, but the human found a way to generate it, let ' s say artificially, and control it. I can cite several, but I will quote one, perhaps the one that changed the history of politics forever

1:38 and is giving atomic bomb. Openheimer, Christopher Nolan' s film, won from several oscar awards, tells the story of Robert Openheimer very well. The physicist known as the repentant father of the atomic bomb. Before Openheimer and other Manhattan project scientists created the bomb in a thousand nine hundred and thirty- eight, in Lea' s, chemists Otto Hand and Fritz Strassmann had discovered something unprecedented about the nuclear hobby. This meant that by bombarding uranium nuclei with neutrons, they split the atom and produced a chain reaction that opened up the possibility of generating an explosion and an energy release as powerful as the rest of the story has never been seen. It is well known, that almost accidental discovery or that it had other purposes, led to the creation of Little Boy and Fatmall, the two atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively and that killed approximately two hundred and forty- six zero people. However, an invention that also changed the world forever and even made all that we are as humanity possible. With the good and the bad the printing press is older. Like otto Han and Fritz Strassman, with the atomic bomb, Guttenberg did not imagine what he was going to generate with his was the germ of revolutions, of advances in human rights, in economy and in thought. However, books are nothing more than a tool and depending on who uses them,

3:10 they can be good or bad. Books such as my struggle by Adolph Hitler, manuals to make bombs containing information that may run counter to human rights or human dignity, have been written and published en masse. Since the printing press was created. The Catholic Church, created its indix librorum prohibition or index banned books if you, like me, do not speak Latin, governments and regimes have also pointed out and marked several books as dangerous to them. Then, for example, during Pinochet' s dictatorship in Chile, a essay written by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattellat, who criticized Disney comics from a Marxist point of view, as capitalist propaganda by U S cultural and corporate imperialism, was banned as reading the donal duck. Or the novel by the President of MigraÁngel Asturias, winner of the Nobel Prize of nineteen sixty- seven, one of the pioneers of the Latin American boom, was censored for thirteen years in his country Guatemala for its portrait and condemnation of the tyranny of dictatorships. American science fiction writer King Bradbury published the perfect metaphor for this in a thousand nine hundred and fifty- three. That' s why, and with the excuse that the Book Fair in Bogotá has just begun, I want to dedicate this chapter to talking to you about books that I recommend reading welcome. Sometimes the best recommendations are the most obvious and we need someone to confirm that something we already know is good. However, we need to know why. Why. For

4:45 example, Monaliza is such an important picture. I think that' s still happening to us in Colombia. That is why I would like to start perhaps by the most important Colombian book, a hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, staying for a moment in Tierrnoamerica, from the northern part of Mexico to the southernmost point of Chinese Argentine. In the middle of these two extremes, of those twenty- five million square kilometers, of mountains, deserts, beaches, islands, snowfalls and valleys, there is an indifying spirit, something that makes us so similar. One could talk about a Latin American soul and somehow, I don' t know how García Márquez managed to put that soul. In words, a hundred years of loneliness, it could be read as the history of an entire continent through a family. Good morning, including the very history of humanity. Every character, every landscape, every gadget, quartet, mystery that appears is an archetype. It reminds us all of something or someone to find new words or ways, to recommend a hundred years of loneliness is difficult. All that has to be said has already been said. However, I think it is precisely the new looks at this novel that make it endure as a classic. About ten years ago, the Chinese writer and novelist Morjan came to Colombia and said something beautiful about Gao' s novel, which is that, reading it in a place as far away and as different from Colombia as China is, he could feel that they were talking about him, his ancestors and his family as if they were anecdotes of their own. Getting

6:15 people from such faraway places to identify themselves in a feeling is one of the requirements for a classic to become classic. But don' t stay. With my word. Let' s listen to the writer Juan Esteban with Stein, who asked why a hundred years of loneliness is a book to read. I do not believe that any book should be read in this life as if it were an obligation, a moral duty, a necessity or a virtue. The great literature is quite the opposite. But that' s why there are some books that make readers' lives better, accompany them, enlighten them, and make sense of them. Deepness, complexity is what happens with a hundred years of solitude, for its dazzling beauty and grace, for its relentless humor, for that haunted language that is the true protagonist of that story that reveals to us the fate of the good day, a lineage condemned to lovelessness and war, which is also the fate of its people of Macondo, which is the reflection of the history of Colombia and, why not, of the history of humanity. All of that has the classics, which are an infallible mirror for

7:46 all of us to recognize ourselves there in our deepest and most disturbing nature. For that reason and for his poetry that is not over, it is always worth returning over a hundred years of solitude. Colombia is undoubtedly a bureaucratic country. He has had to enter a public or government office in the center of the city. They all look the same, designed, built, furnished and decorated so that anyone who enters loses the hope of leaving soon and so that any attism of joy is fun yi is told of the paperwork, requirements and formalities that need to be done. Until recently it was time to carry the extended card to one hundred and fifty percent, and I believe that still a stamp of this office, a signature of such an controller, a certificate admitted by another controller. In short, all these bureaucratic, unnecessary and cumbersome processes seem inspired by the next recommended book, the Franzcafca process. In that novel ca, the protagonist faces a faceless judicial apparatus that he cannot speak to or know who is speaking to. Every one is accused, but he doesn' t know what different solutions he' s looking for. But that struggle of the human against the system despairs him, exhausts him, overcomes him morally, is a captivating narrative in which CAFCA develops his idea about the law, about the relationship of the human with the institutions that seem created not to overcome, but to cause confusion and more problems. And if from classic literature classics who

9:18 appeal to the deepest and eternal conflicts of the human, we speak, I cannot leave out one of Dostoyevski' s best crime and punishment. There are novels that might well have been written in the 19th century or the 21st century, which we would not notice. Crime and punishment are in that category. We could say that it is a detective story also that it is a study of the criminal mind that portrays the atonement and redemption of a young man, or even that it is a book that explores the mind and moral limits, or that it is a treatise on the human as the only master of the human and everything is allowed. All of the above is true. At the same time, scratching Nikov is a young man studying before, plunged into poverty and precarious existence, but with airs of greatness, who considers that his destiny is to have a bright future. Poverty leads him to renounce his studies and resorts to stealing and killing an old usurer whom he considers to be a inferior being compared to him who, according to his own perception, is a superior being. Crime leads him to delusions and to lose the notion of reality.

10:24 At several moments I do not tell you the end to encourage you to read it and if it does not attract your attention, the moral and ethical nuances that the novel, the argument and the narrative pose. Surely it is a timeless book that, by the way, has had many adaptations to the cinema and the theatre and that inspired a great movie, as it is Wildiyalen match Point. Many writers agree that the book that we should all read, yes or yes, is The Quixote of Cervantes. It is considered the first modern novel and has been the subject of columns of opinion, analysis, essays, doctoral theses, amnouscen. There are only comments to the bones about the time of Miguel de Cervantes, and I am not going to bring him the opposite. It is a book that I recommend reading not only because it was the influence of literature in Spanish from now on, but because it offers us an entertaining history that, moreover, deepens in human feelings and attitudes that we continue to see and feel today, several centuries later. It' s a milestone, an undeniable classic, but how read this novel is. In two thousand fifteen, the Center for Sociological Research of Spain conducted a survey to commemorate the four hundred years of the publication of the second part of the book. Yes, if I didn' t know, it was published in two parts, ten years apart, and found fifty- one to eat three percent believed it was a rather difficult time to read sixty- six percent. Of those who answered this they considered it difficult because of the language in which it is written and the sixteen comma four. He argues that they have not done so because

11:54 it refers to a very old age. Among those who have read the book in complete partial way the way. Only twenty- one comma six percent says you' ve read it completely. Another twenty- one percent of some chapters and forty comma nine percent have not read it. Along with the quijote and classic books such as the llada, which I also highly recommend or odyssey, are obligatory readings in many schools during high school. According to the writer and Calvino, when we say classic, we mean a work that helps you define yourself in relation to or even in opposition to it. But according to Marten, a classic is a book that people praise and don' t read. In that sense, it is good to read these classics of literature at school, or by obligation I transferred the question to writer Catalina Navas, and this answered me. It is good to read them, because the school system must deliver some informed students at a minimum level. What happens most of the time, however, is that the people who give these contents, who give these classes are experts in the basic structures or are experts in breaking down the texts in a superficial way. Let' s say redesumens, start knots character link.

13:13 What' s going on? I write to the names of the ten main characters and what happens is that they end up counterforming readers, because then they are people who are not connected, first with the enjoyment of reading, but also they have not developed critical reading skills to confront texts beyond. From the purely superficial. So I do, I think we should have a scenario of information about what the panorama of contemporary literature is. But reading the texts so deeply and let' s say putting texts that are above the students' abilities, because it ends up being detrimental to him. The classics, you have to read them. But I would like to move on to the current picture, to that of contemporary writers. Fortunately, in Colombia there is life in literature after García Márquez and although the proportions are different, we find good, excellent, regular books of all kinds. So I' m going to move on to recommending contemporary Colombian literature. There are writers who like to hoard headlines, attend the presentations of their books to appear frequently in tertures and headlines.

14:31 This is not the case of Tomás González, an anti- Oqueño writer who, despite his age, is seventy years old, seems to be new to the literary scene. But of all González' s books it is his novel the hard light that I would like to add to this list. I came to him because a friend gave me the book with the promise that he was a necessary writer and as that adjective has lost value of how much it has been handled I doubted However, I trusted in the criterion of friend and did not disappoint me. In difficult light it was published in two thousand eleven or NR. He tells the story of David, protagonist and narrator, a painter who tells two moments of his life, the euthanasia of James, his son and his present in old age in which he goes blind. The novel intertwines a past full of pain that begins in New York, the day Jacobo travels with his brother to another state where autanacia is legal. David awaits the calls that tell him the journey and the process of voluntary death of his son, who, after a traffic accident, was left without mobility in his legs, with unbearable and chronic pains, without any cure. At the same time, he narrates his present in a farm in Colombia where he already has his days, where the sight is almost null and must leave his life. As a painter, yes, I know it sounds like a sad book, but its writing so beautiful and fluid, takes us in a gentle and touching way to subjects that cause so much fear and are as stonary as aging and a death. González' s books look like his life, not because they are self- fictions, but because his narrative flows like his days in his country house, away from reflectors and cultural jetset. Another interesting and different book that

16:07 appears in the landscape of new writers is the land gauge of the country writer Esteban Duperly. It' s one of the few period novels written lately. The story is that of a surveyor engineer, that is, a professional in charge of measuring to cell land belonging to the Colombian army in some war of the late nineteenth century or early decades of the twentieth, think of a rough arid place that, when it dawns fresh make thirty- nine degrees somewhere in the eastern plains. There, this surveyor engineer, who is to be known as the lieutenant of the rest of the novel, arrives at a base in the middle of nowhere, with submission marking the border to the north of the country. However, as well as in the Kafka bureaucracy, the lieutenant crashes into the military bureaucracy, in which solemnities and rituals are repeated in no sense other than obeying an order coming from a faraway place. The novel is a mix between the stories of macrolel Gaviero de Mutis, the castle of Kafka and the volagine of José Ifacio. Rivera the dynamics of the absurdity that is bureaucracy in a base in the middle of nowhere, without water and in a full drought, leads the lieutenant to get into trouble and leave the story to them to look for the book and read it. In the list of books by Colombian authors I need time to include many ofÁlvaro Mutis, Roberto Burgos, Piedad Bonne, Evelio Rosero, Juan Gabriel Vázquez, Juan Esteban Costaín, Ricardo Silva Romero and many more. I do the recounting and I cannot help but

17:41 think that Colombian literature has managed to transcend the armed conflict and the shadow of the magical realism so great that García Márquez left. I looked for my friend, writer Gabriel Iriarte, to give me his top three recommended Colombian librus staff. These are, except for the work of Gabriel García Márquez. I think the top three books of the last decades in Colombia may be next. First of all, as far as essay is concerned, there is undoubtedly the political power in Colombia of Fernando Guillén Martínez, an absolutely seminal work, an indispensable point of reference to understand the past and present of our country. Secondly, in terms of chronic journalism, journalistic journalism, without a doubt, there is in number one a work by Germán Castro Caicedo. Bitter Colombia perhaps the first great chronicle portraying the situation of Colombia in the 1980s, especially in the most remote regions. And in literature, there is no doubt the forgetfulness that we will be Hector Abat Fasciolins, a work that has been turned into a reference point for contemporary Colombian literature throughout the world. A genre of literature that I find difficult is comedy. While cinema is full of very good comedy films, in the case of books it is almost opposite, and one of those exceptions

19:15 is the conjuring of fools. The deceased and writer John Kennedy tool New Orleans, in the 1950s approximately a man in his thirty generous thick mustache meats that ends in tip with green hunter cap and a scarf waits on the street for his mom to leave a warehouse. This is Ignacio SJ. Ragley. He is an unemployed celive with a master' s degree in medieval history who watches passers- by pass and criticizes his clothes as modern, which he considers offenses. To good taste and decency. Ignacius is a guy with his mind in the middle who is forced to get work in the 20th century, which leads him to accept underpaid jobs and below his education as a hot dog street vendor or sweeping a bad- death bar. These are the perfect ingredients for a comedy like a few. The book won the Pulicher Prize in a thousand nine hundred and eighty- one, but the story of its author and book is even more fascinating. The novel was published twelve years after its author' s suicide. Thirty- one years before his death, Tool sent copies of his novel to many publishers, but they all rejected it. After his death, his mother Telmatul devoted herself to calling insistently the writer Walker Percio to read the late son novel. The writer, after the persistence of the woman, decided to browse a few pages, but found a book that he could not stop reading. This book is more than a comedy, because it is also deep,

20:48 distressing and sad. I don' t remember reading many more books of comedy or not, so look for writer Daniel San Peruspina to tell me which are the two most comical bros he' s ever read. This told me well, so I felt my head fast Roberto would be honest. No doubt of the books of pink fontana tales Any pink fontana tales, all are good, but especially that of the table of the wooden galanas Galena, all the books of gudaal tales in the same thing, especially perhaps one that is called without feathers Love lasts three years. That' s from a Frenchman named Frederick bat Drinking, very funny and very good. How I was bald about a novel by a Dutchman named Aaron Grumberg, who is very good, very funny, very entertaining. Perhaps I would say that also some novels by enríque Jardiel ponces to the Spanish, in particular one called Peru. There were once eleven thousand virgins and Colombians. I would think that the anthology that Juan Esteban Constantin did about Lucas' work, Knight Calderón on clim is really very good and would also recommend all the books of Alfredo Iriarte or any of them, especially perhaps tropical bestiary. And here, then, forgives me for the lack of modesty. But there is also one that amused me a lot and that is worth reading, which are the hysteria lessons of Colombia told by Daniel Samper Pisano.

22:18 I think those would be mine. You' ve heard of the Southern Gothic. It is a genre of literature from the south of the United States in which the magical or strange appears not in an atmosphere of mystery of suspense, but with the excuse of talking about a social problem that my literate friends correct me. But it' s in that movement that we can find. My next recommendation is Solomon' s song by the American Nobel winner of nine hundred and ninety- three. Tony Morrison. The novel tells the story of Macon Mishman, an African- American man who grew up in the northwest of the country, in a middle- class family, who is prosperous and who is more integrated into the lives of white people than into the culture of their ancestors. At one point in the book, Mirkman is forced to discover, explore, understand and accept a more dangerous world the ghetto of eccentrics, idlers, prostitutes, thugs and lunatics he visited as a child in his grandfather' s village. But that new world is also rewarding because it opens to a wider and freer sphere, it reveals the possibility of knowing its own origins and realizing the potential that lies in the lives, failures and victories of our ancestors.

23:33 The novel is a mixture of spiritual and mystical elements with racial criticism, which talks about the identity of a man who has spent his life digging away from his roots to find a better lifestyle. Recently, the Ministry of Culture declared the two thousand twenty- four as the year of Arnoldo Palacios, the chocuano writer, one of the most important figures, but the most Afro- Colombian literature, author of the novel. The stars are black, which is the one- and- a- half- day account of an impoverished teenage girl in the impoverished choco is a cruel account of how real she is. However, Afro- Colombian writers and writers do not enjoy the same fame that they are not. I looked for writer Bella Vidal to tell me how racism is expressed in the literary ducia in Colombia. This he told me, racism in the Colombian publishing industry and in the world in general manifests itself. I ' d say there are two ways. In the first point, because what we have historically found is that racialized peoples have been narrated from the stereotypes that fall on us, with exoticization, with pauperization as a strange thing, with hypersexualization, for example. All manifestations of racism in everyday life have been brought to literature, as expressed in literature. And this has to do in part because we have been narrated and narrated historically by others, others and others who are distant from our realities. Or that, although it is so close they

25:04 read them from the racism that is installed in our society. The other demonstration has much more to do with structural racism. Let us say that the first has more to do with interpersonal and everyday racism. And in this second I mean that in our territories there are not enough books, there are no publishers and, therefore, our authors have much less chance of being published. And when we look at the panorama of the publishing industry in Colombia, the truth is that the presence of Afro authors is minimal, especially if we compare with the population density and the ten percent Afro population that we have in our country.

25:47 Well, like the significant number of indigenous people and like this year, the country invited to the book fair in Bogotá, is Brazil could not leave out an excellent book by an author Budapest, of the also singer Chico uarque if you know who the author is, it may happen to you like I, who thought it was only a musician. Well, this is Chico warque ' s third novel of many more. In Budapest we follow José Costa, a ghost writer, who is dedicated to writing books and speeches for others and not in his own name. He is a Brazilian who lives in Rio de Janeiro. Costa dominates Portuguese with exceptional skill and writes like no one else.

26:30 On one occasion, returning to a congress of ghost writers or banónimos Costa makes a stop in Budapest. As in that city no one is able to pronounce his name José Costa, then he becomes Zoce Costa. For him, the city is an enigma and its language, as I would say huarque is Aburo Comillas, the dialect reserved for communication with the marigno Cierro Comillas. We could say that Budapest is a story of literary love where identity becomes a mystery. In the art of writing, the author becomes his own literary companion, inventing himself as another and writing through another his masterpiece. As I always have hundreds, thousands books on the outside, I don' t know if millions of very important books like Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo, the Miserables of Victor Hugo, Movi Dick, Herman Melville, the boys of Zinc Mambo, Varía, Gustavo flo Ver, in short there are dozens. Books, like any tool, can be used for many purposes, They can be dangerous, useful or the germ of something totally new and revealing. There are books that save lives, there are books that ruin them There are exciting, boring, thoughtful, good and bad. The important thing is that they exist and exist of all kinds. Although the kemen have already fulfilled their purpose, it is precisely to be so dangerous for someone to cause such a level of restlessness by moving in such a way to someone who decided to take them to the stake. But I think the most dangerous books are like the ones I included in this list,

28:03 so arbitrary and personal. They are books that leave us with more open questions than immovable answers and are almost always questions about ourselves. I am Roberto Pombo and this was chapter eighty- four of my questions. See you in the next chapter from now on. This chapter of my questions is available on all podcast platforms. This episode was made possible by the Kfam Theatre. Much more than Teatro Dirección Roberto Pombo, Producción general juan Abel Gutiérrez, editorial advisor, Daniel San Pedro Espino, Guiones juan Abel Gutiérrez and Johnny Rodríguez. Field production Marcela Salazar and Lucía Beltrán. Postproduction of audio Carlos Bernard