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

WEBVTT

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I' m Roberto Pombo. Welcome
to my questions, a half- hurry

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program sponsored by KFAM theater. Much
more than theater in the world. There

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are thousands, if not millions,
of definitive or necessary lists of books that

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we must read throughout our lives.
And as the international Bogotá Book Fair has

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already begun, it brings you my
recommendations from the books that I think should

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be read. It is good not
to read the classics of literature in adolescence.

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For this chapter we spoke with the
writer Gabriel Idiartio, with the writer

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Catarina Navas, with the writer Juan
Esteban Constantin, with the writer Vegae Vidal

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and with the writer Daniel Samperro I
am Roberto Pombo. And this is chapter

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eighty- four of my questions.
The history of humanity is full of human

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events that marked destiny forever. From
his arbors, the human sought a way

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to suffer less in his quest for
survival. Then there are inventions that are

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hypnotized in evolution, such as the
wheel in approximately the year three thousand two

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hundred BC, or the use of
weapons as swords and knives spears about five

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hundred zero years ago. Let'
s not talk about fire here, because

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it already existed, but the human
found a way to generate it, let

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' s say artificially, and control
it. I can cite several, but

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I will quote one, perhaps the
one that changed the history of politics forever

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and is giving atomic bomb. Openheimer, Christopher Nolan' s film, won

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from several oscar awards, tells the
story of Robert Openheimer very well. The

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physicist known as the repentant father of
the atomic bomb. Before Openheimer and other

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Manhattan project scientists created the bomb in
a thousand nine hundred and thirty- eight,

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in Lea' s, chemists Otto
Hand and Fritz Strassmann had discovered something

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unprecedented about the nuclear hobby. This
meant that by bombarding uranium nuclei with neutrons,

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they split the atom and produced a
chain reaction that opened up the possibility

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of generating an explosion and an energy
release as powerful as the rest of the

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story has never been seen. It
is well known, that almost accidental discovery

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or that it had other purposes,
led to the creation of Little Boy and

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Fatmall, the two atomic bombs that
the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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respectively and that killed approximately two hundred
and forty- six zero people. However,

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an invention that also changed the world
forever and even made all that we

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are as humanity possible. With the
good and the bad the printing press is

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older. Like otto Han and Fritz
Strassman, with the atomic bomb, Guttenberg

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did not imagine what he was going
to generate with his was the germ of

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revolutions, of advances in human rights, in economy and in thought. However,

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books are nothing more than a tool
and depending on who uses them,

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they can be good or bad.
Books such as my struggle by Adolph Hitler,

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manuals to make bombs containing information that
may run counter to human rights or

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human dignity, have been written and
published en masse. Since the printing press

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was created. The Catholic Church,
created its indix librorum prohibition or index banned

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books if you, like me,
do not speak Latin, governments and regimes

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have also pointed out and marked several
books as dangerous to them. Then,

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for example, during Pinochet' s
dictatorship in Chile, a essay written by

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Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattellat, who
criticized Disney comics from a Marxist point of

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view, as capitalist propaganda by U
S cultural and corporate imperialism, was banned

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as reading the donal duck. Or
the novel by the President of MigraÁngel

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Asturias, winner of the Nobel Prize
of nineteen sixty- seven, one of

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the pioneers of the Latin American boom, was censored for thirteen years in his

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country Guatemala for its portrait and condemnation
of the tyranny of dictatorships. American science

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fiction writer King Bradbury published the perfect
metaphor for this in a thousand nine hundred

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and fifty- three. That'
s why, and with the excuse that

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the Book Fair in Bogotá has just
begun, I want to dedicate this chapter

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to talking to you about books that
I recommend reading welcome. Sometimes the best

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recommendations are the most obvious and we
need someone to confirm that something we already

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know is good. However, we
need to know why. Why. For

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example, Monaliza is such an important
picture. I think that' s still

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happening to us in Colombia. That
is why I would like to start perhaps

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by the most important Colombian book,
a hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García

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Márquez, staying for a moment in
Tierrnoamerica, from the northern part of Mexico

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to the southernmost point of Chinese Argentine. In the middle of these two extremes,

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of those twenty- five million square
kilometers, of mountains, deserts,

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beaches, islands, snowfalls and valleys, there is an indifying spirit, something

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that makes us so similar. One
could talk about a Latin American soul and

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somehow, I don' t know
how García Márquez managed to put that soul.

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In words, a hundred years of
loneliness, it could be read as

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the history of an entire continent through
a family. Good morning, including the

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very history of humanity. Every character, every landscape, every gadget, quartet,

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mystery that appears is an archetype.
It reminds us all of something or

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someone to find new words or ways, to recommend a hundred years of loneliness

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is difficult. All that has to
be said has already been said. However,

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I think it is precisely the new
looks at this novel that make it

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endure as a classic. About ten
years ago, the Chinese writer and novelist

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Morjan came to Colombia and said something
beautiful about Gao' s novel, which

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is that, reading it in a
place as far away and as different from

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Colombia as China is, he could
feel that they were talking about him,

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his ancestors and his family as if
they were anecdotes of their own. Getting

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people from such faraway places to identify
themselves in a feeling is one of the

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requirements for a classic to become classic. But don' t stay. With

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my word. Let' s listen
to the writer Juan Esteban with Stein,

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who asked why a hundred years of
loneliness is a book to read. I

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do not believe that any book should
be read in this life as if it

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were an obligation, a moral duty, a necessity or a virtue. The

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great literature is quite the opposite.
But that' s why there are some

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books that make readers' lives better, accompany them, enlighten them, and

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make sense of them. Deepness,
complexity is what happens with a hundred years

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of solitude, for its dazzling beauty
and grace, for its relentless humor,

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for that haunted language that is the
true protagonist of that story that reveals to

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us the fate of the good day, a lineage condemned to lovelessness and war,

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which is also the fate of its
people of Macondo, which is the

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reflection of the history of Colombia and, why not, of the history of

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humanity. All of that has the
classics, which are an infallible mirror for

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all of us to recognize ourselves there
in our deepest and most disturbing nature.

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For that reason and for his poetry
that is not over, it is always

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worth returning over a hundred years of
solitude. Colombia is undoubtedly a bureaucratic country.

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He has had to enter a public
or government office in the center of

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the city. They all look the
same, designed, built, furnished and

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decorated so that anyone who enters loses
the hope of leaving soon and so that

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any attism of joy is fun yi
is told of the paperwork, requirements and

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formalities that need to be done.
Until recently it was time to carry the

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extended card to one hundred and fifty
percent, and I believe that still a

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stamp of this office, a signature
of such an controller, a certificate admitted

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by another controller. In short,
all these bureaucratic, unnecessary and cumbersome processes

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seem inspired by the next recommended book, the Franzcafca process. In that novel

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ca, the protagonist faces a faceless
judicial apparatus that he cannot speak to or

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know who is speaking to. Every
one is accused, but he doesn'

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t know what different solutions he'
s looking for. But that struggle of

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the human against the system despairs him, exhausts him, overcomes him morally,

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is a captivating narrative in which CAFCA
develops his idea about the law, about

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the relationship of the human with the
institutions that seem created not to overcome,

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but to cause confusion and more problems. And if from classic literature classics who

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appeal to the deepest and eternal conflicts
of the human, we speak, I

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cannot leave out one of Dostoyevski'
s best crime and punishment. There are

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novels that might well have been written
in the 19th century or the 21st century,

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which we would not notice. Crime
and punishment are in that category.

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We could say that it is a
detective story also that it is a study

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of the criminal mind that portrays the
atonement and redemption of a young man,

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or even that it is a book
that explores the mind and moral limits,

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or that it is a treatise on
the human as the only master of the

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human and everything is allowed. All
of the above is true. At the

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same time, scratching Nikov is a
young man studying before, plunged into poverty

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and precarious existence, but with airs
of greatness, who considers that his destiny

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is to have a bright future.
Poverty leads him to renounce his studies and

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resorts to stealing and killing an old
usurer whom he considers to be a inferior

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being compared to him who, according
to his own perception, is a superior

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being. Crime leads him to delusions
and to lose the notion of reality.

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At several moments I do not tell
you the end to encourage you to read

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it and if it does not attract
your attention, the moral and ethical nuances

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that the novel, the argument and
the narrative pose. Surely it is a

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timeless book that, by the way, has had many adaptations to the cinema

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and the theatre and that inspired a
great movie, as it is Wildiyalen match

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Point. Many writers agree that the
book that we should all read, yes

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or yes, is The Quixote of
Cervantes. It is considered the first modern

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novel and has been the subject of
columns of opinion, analysis, essays,

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doctoral theses, amnouscen. There are
only comments to the bones about the time

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of Miguel de Cervantes, and I
am not going to bring him the opposite.

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It is a book that I recommend
reading not only because it was the

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influence of literature in Spanish from now
on, but because it offers us an

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entertaining history that, moreover, deepens
in human feelings and attitudes that we continue

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to see and feel today, several
centuries later. It' s a milestone,

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an undeniable classic, but how read
this novel is. In two thousand

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fifteen, the Center for Sociological Research
of Spain conducted a survey to commemorate the

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four hundred years of the publication of
the second part of the book. Yes,

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if I didn' t know,
it was published in two parts,

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ten years apart, and found fifty- one to eat three percent believed it

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was a rather difficult time to read
sixty- six percent. Of those who

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answered this they considered it difficult because
of the language in which it is written

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and the sixteen comma four. He
argues that they have not done so because

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it refers to a very old age. Among those who have read the book

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in complete partial way the way.
Only twenty- one comma six percent says

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you' ve read it completely.
Another twenty- one percent of some chapters

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and forty comma nine percent have not
read it. Along with the quijote and

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classic books such as the llada,
which I also highly recommend or odyssey,

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are obligatory readings in many schools during
high school. According to the writer and

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Calvino, when we say classic,
we mean a work that helps you define

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yourself in relation to or even in
opposition to it. But according to Marten,

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a classic is a book that people
praise and don' t read.

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In that sense, it is good
to read these classics of literature at school,

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or by obligation I transferred the question
to writer Catalina Navas, and this

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answered me. It is good to
read them, because the school system must

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deliver some informed students at a minimum
level. What happens most of the time,

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however, is that the people who
give these contents, who give these

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classes are experts in the basic structures
or are experts in breaking down the texts

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in a superficial way. Let'
s say redesumens, start knots character link.

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What' s going on? I
write to the names of the ten

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main characters and what happens is that
they end up counterforming readers, because then

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they are people who are not connected, first with the enjoyment of reading,

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but also they have not developed critical
reading skills to confront texts beyond. From

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the purely superficial. So I do, I think we should have a scenario

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of information about what the panorama of
contemporary literature is. But reading the texts

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so deeply and let' s say
putting texts that are above the students'

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abilities, because it ends up being
detrimental to him. The classics, you

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have to read them. But I
would like to move on to the current

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picture, to that of contemporary writers. Fortunately, in Colombia there is life

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in literature after García Márquez and although
the proportions are different, we find good,

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excellent, regular books of all kinds. So I' m going to

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move on to recommending contemporary Colombian literature. There are writers who like to hoard

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headlines, attend the presentations of their
books to appear frequently in tertures and headlines.

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This is not the case of Tomás
González, an anti- Oqueño writer

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who, despite his age, is
seventy years old, seems to be new

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to the literary scene. But of
all González' s books it is his

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novel the hard light that I would
like to add to this list. I

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came to him because a friend gave
me the book with the promise that he

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was a necessary writer and as that
adjective has lost value of how much it

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has been handled I doubted However,
I trusted in the criterion of friend and

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did not disappoint me. In difficult
light it was published in two thousand eleven

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or NR. He tells the story
of David, protagonist and narrator, a

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painter who tells two moments of his
life, the euthanasia of James, his

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son and his present in old age
in which he goes blind. The novel

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intertwines a past full of pain that
begins in New York, the day Jacobo

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travels with his brother to another state
where autanacia is legal. David awaits the

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calls that tell him the journey and
the process of voluntary death of his son,

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who, after a traffic accident,
was left without mobility in his legs,

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with unbearable and chronic pains, without
any cure. At the same time,

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he narrates his present in a farm
in Colombia where he already has his

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days, where the sight is almost
null and must leave his life. As

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a painter, yes, I know
it sounds like a sad book, but

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its writing so beautiful and fluid,
takes us in a gentle and touching way

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to subjects that cause so much fear
and are as stonary as aging and a

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death. González' s books look
like his life, not because they are

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self- fictions, but because his
narrative flows like his days in his country

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house, away from reflectors and cultural
jetset. Another interesting and different book that

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appears in the landscape of new writers
is the land gauge of the country writer

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Esteban Duperly. It' s one
of the few period novels written lately.

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The story is that of a surveyor
engineer, that is, a professional in

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charge of measuring to cell land belonging
to the Colombian army in some war of

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the late nineteenth century or early decades
of the twentieth, think of a rough

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arid place that, when it dawns
fresh make thirty- nine degrees somewhere in

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the eastern plains. There, this
surveyor engineer, who is to be known

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as the lieutenant of the rest of
the novel, arrives at a base in

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the middle of nowhere, with submission
marking the border to the north of the

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country. However, as well as
in the Kafka bureaucracy, the lieutenant crashes

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into the military bureaucracy, in which
solemnities and rituals are repeated in no sense

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other than obeying an order coming from
a faraway place. The novel is a

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mix between the stories of macrolel Gaviero
de Mutis, the castle of Kafka and

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the volagine of José Ifacio. Rivera
the dynamics of the absurdity that is bureaucracy

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in a base in the middle of
nowhere, without water and in a full

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drought, leads the lieutenant to get
into trouble and leave the story to them

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to look for the book and read
it. In the list of books by

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Colombian authors I need time to include
many ofÁlvaro Mutis, Roberto Burgos,

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Piedad Bonne, Evelio Rosero, Juan
Gabriel Vázquez, Juan Esteban Costaín, Ricardo

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Silva Romero and many more. I
do the recounting and I cannot help but

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think that Colombian literature has managed to
transcend the armed conflict and the shadow of

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the magical realism so great that García
Márquez left. I looked for my friend,

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writer Gabriel Iriarte, to give me
his top three recommended Colombian librus staff.

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These are, except for the work
of Gabriel García Márquez. I think

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the top three books of the last
decades in Colombia may be next. First

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of all, as far as essay
is concerned, there is undoubtedly the political

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power in Colombia of Fernando Guillén Martínez, an absolutely seminal work, an indispensable

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point of reference to understand the past
and present of our country. Secondly,

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in terms of chronic journalism, journalistic
journalism, without a doubt, there is

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in number one a work by Germán
Castro Caicedo. Bitter Colombia perhaps the first

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great chronicle portraying the situation of Colombia
in the 1980s, especially in the most

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remote regions. And in literature,
there is no doubt the forgetfulness that we

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will be Hector Abat Fasciolins, a
work that has been turned into a reference

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point for contemporary Colombian literature throughout the
world. A genre of literature that I

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find difficult is comedy. While cinema
is full of very good comedy films,

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in the case of books it is
almost opposite, and one of those exceptions

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is the conjuring of fools. The
deceased and writer John Kennedy tool New Orleans,

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in the 1950s approximately a man in
his thirty generous thick mustache meats that

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ends in tip with green hunter cap
and a scarf waits on the street for

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his mom to leave a warehouse.
This is Ignacio SJ. Ragley. He

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is an unemployed celive with a master' s degree in medieval history who watches

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passers- by pass and criticizes his
clothes as modern, which he considers offenses.

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To good taste and decency. Ignacius
is a guy with his mind in

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the middle who is forced to get
work in the 20th century, which leads

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him to accept underpaid jobs and below
his education as a hot dog street vendor

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or sweeping a bad- death bar. These are the perfect ingredients for a

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comedy like a few. The book
won the Pulicher Prize in a thousand nine

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hundred and eighty- one, but
the story of its author and book is

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even more fascinating. The novel was
published twelve years after its author' s

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suicide. Thirty- one years before
his death, Tool sent copies of his

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novel to many publishers, but they
all rejected it. After his death,

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his mother Telmatul devoted herself to calling
insistently the writer Walker Percio to read the

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late son novel. The writer,
after the persistence of the woman, decided

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to browse a few pages, but
found a book that he could not stop

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reading. This book is more than
a comedy, because it is also deep,

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distressing and sad. I don'
t remember reading many more books of

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comedy or not, so look for
writer Daniel San Peruspina to tell me which

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are the two most comical bros he' s ever read. This told me

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well, so I felt my head
fast Roberto would be honest. No doubt

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of the books of pink fontana tales
Any pink fontana tales, all are good,

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but especially that of the table of
the wooden galanas Galena, all the

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books of gudaal tales in the same
thing, especially perhaps one that is called

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without feathers Love lasts three years.
That' s from a Frenchman named Frederick

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bat Drinking, very funny and very
good. How I was bald about a

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novel by a Dutchman named Aaron Grumberg, who is very good, very funny,

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very entertaining. Perhaps I would say
that also some novels by enríque Jardiel

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ponces to the Spanish, in particular
one called Peru. There were once eleven

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thousand virgins and Colombians. I would
think that the anthology that Juan Esteban Constantin

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did about Lucas' work, Knight
Calderón on clim is really very good and

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would also recommend all the books of
Alfredo Iriarte or any of them, especially

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perhaps tropical bestiary. And here,
then, forgives me for the lack of

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modesty. But there is also one
that amused me a lot and that is

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worth reading, which are the hysteria
lessons of Colombia told by Daniel Samper Pisano.

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I think those would be mine.
You' ve heard of the Southern

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Gothic. It is a genre of
literature from the south of the United States

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in which the magical or strange appears
not in an atmosphere of mystery of suspense,

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but with the excuse of talking about
a social problem that my literate friends

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correct me. But it' s
in that movement that we can find.

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My next recommendation is Solomon' s
song by the American Nobel winner of nine

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hundred and ninety- three. Tony
Morrison. The novel tells the story of

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Macon Mishman, an African- American
man who grew up in the northwest of

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the country, in a middle-
class family, who is prosperous and who

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is more integrated into the lives of
white people than into the culture of their

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ancestors. At one point in the
book, Mirkman is forced to discover,

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explore, understand and accept a more
dangerous world the ghetto of eccentrics, idlers,

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prostitutes, thugs and lunatics he visited
as a child in his grandfather'

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s village. But that new world
is also rewarding because it opens to a

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wider and freer sphere, it reveals
the possibility of knowing its own origins and

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realizing the potential that lies in the
lives, failures and victories of our ancestors.

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The novel is a mixture of spiritual
and mystical elements with racial criticism,

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which talks about the identity of a
man who has spent his life digging away

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from his roots to find a better
lifestyle. Recently, the Ministry of Culture

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declared the two thousand twenty- four
as the year of Arnoldo Palacios, the

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chocuano writer, one of the most
important figures, but the most Afro-

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Colombian literature, author of the novel. The stars are black, which is

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the one- and- a-
half- day account of an impoverished teenage

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girl in the impoverished choco is a
cruel account of how real she is.

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However, Afro- Colombian writers and
writers do not enjoy the same fame that

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they are not. I looked for
writer Bella Vidal to tell me how racism

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is expressed in the literary ducia in
Colombia. This he told me, racism

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in the Colombian publishing industry and in
the world in general manifests itself. I

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' d say there are two ways. In the first point, because what

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we have historically found is that racialized
peoples have been narrated from the stereotypes that

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fall on us, with exoticization,
with pauperization as a strange thing, with

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hypersexualization, for example. All manifestations
of racism in everyday life have been brought

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to literature, as expressed in literature. And this has to do in part

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because we have been narrated and narrated
historically by others, others and others who

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are distant from our realities. Or
that, although it is so close they

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read them from the racism that is
installed in our society. The other demonstration

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has much more to do with structural
racism. Let us say that the first

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has more to do with interpersonal and
everyday racism. And in this second I

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mean that in our territories there are
not enough books, there are no publishers

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and, therefore, our authors have
much less chance of being published. And

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when we look at the panorama of
the publishing industry in Colombia, the truth

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is that the presence of Afro authors
is minimal, especially if we compare with

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the population density and the ten percent
Afro population that we have in our country.

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Well, like the significant number of
indigenous people and like this year,

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the country invited to the book fair
in Bogotá, is Brazil could not leave

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out an excellent book by an author
Budapest, of the also singer Chico uarque

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if you know who the author is, it may happen to you like I,

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who thought it was only a musician. Well, this is Chico warque

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' s third novel of many more. In Budapest we follow José Costa,

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a ghost writer, who is dedicated
to writing books and speeches for others and

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not in his own name. He
is a Brazilian who lives in Rio de

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Janeiro. Costa dominates Portuguese with exceptional
skill and writes like no one else.

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On one occasion, returning to a
congress of ghost writers or banónimos Costa makes

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a stop in Budapest. As in
that city no one is able to pronounce

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his name José Costa, then he
becomes Zoce Costa. For him, the

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city is an enigma and its language, as I would say huarque is Aburo

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Comillas, the dialect reserved for communication
with the marigno Cierro Comillas. We could

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say that Budapest is a story of
literary love where identity becomes a mystery.

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In the art of writing, the
author becomes his own literary companion, inventing

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himself as another and writing through another
his masterpiece. As I always have hundreds,

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thousands books on the outside, I
don' t know if millions of

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very important books like Pedro Páramo,
Juan Rulfo, the Miserables of Victor Hugo,

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00:27:21.960 --> 00:27:25.519
Movi Dick, Herman Melville, the
boys of Zinc Mambo, Varía,

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00:27:25.720 --> 00:27:30.039
Gustavo flo Ver, in short there
are dozens. Books, like any tool,

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can be used for many purposes,
They can be dangerous, useful or

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the germ of something totally new and
revealing. There are books that save lives,

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there are books that ruin them There
are exciting, boring, thoughtful,

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good and bad. The important thing
is that they exist and exist of all

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kinds. Although the kemen have already
fulfilled their purpose, it is precisely to

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be so dangerous for someone to cause
such a level of restlessness by moving in

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such a way to someone who decided
to take them to the stake. But

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I think the most dangerous books are
like the ones I included in this list,

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so arbitrary and personal. They are
books that leave us with more open

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questions than immovable answers and are almost
always questions about ourselves. I am Roberto

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Pombo and this was chapter eighty-
four of my questions. See you in

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00:28:17.559 --> 00:28:22.599
the next chapter from now on.
This chapter of my questions is available on

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00:28:22.720 --> 00:28:30.000
all podcast platforms. This episode was
made possible by the Kfam Theatre. Much

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00:28:30.039 --> 00:28:36.400
more than Teatro Dirección Roberto Pombo,
Producción general juan Abel Gutiérrez, editorial advisor,

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00:28:36.640 --> 00:28:41.559
Daniel San Pedro Espino, Guiones juan
Abel Gutiérrez and Johnny Rodríguez. Field

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00:28:41.640 --> 00:28:45.960
production Marcela Salazar and Lucía Beltrán.
Postproduction of audio Carlos Bernard