Fantasmas del escritor

“Forgive me if I make mine, with all due respect, of the expression Nabokov coined when he said that the book that the reader holds in his hands is made up of overwhelming opinions. They obey to reflections on a wide array of literary maters, culture and politics, always addressed from what could be described as the subjective essay, that is, an attempt at being involved as a writer in matters which precisely, in terms of being a writer, question me time and again and of which I do not have a politically correct stance, but rather a somewhat bold, melancholic, even ironic, and always determined one.”  

Thus begins this rivitting book by Adolfo García Ortega who with a thirty-year experience on his shoulders, suggests a personal journey through some of present-day’s cultural references. All fits into this encyclopedic book: the passing of time, music, Gonzalo Suárez, Doctorow, intimate experiences, Julián Herbert, Jihad and the dangers of identity, Günter Grass, John Ford, Annie Ernaux, cannibalism,  Rushdie, Wittgenstein, DeLillo, Atxaga, Mordzinski, Stevenson, Longares, the automatons, Caravaggio, Bill Viola, Nabokov, the Baroque and a long etcetera of names and matters.  In the mosaic of “Ghosts” that make up these pages, the author does not elude the ethical commitment, at times awfully close the aesthetic compromise, nor the audacious proposal of a literary theory.