
La claridad
The jury of the VI Premio Ribera del Duero, which included writers Óscar Esquivias, Clara Obligado and chaired by Fernando Aramburu, unanimously awarded Clarity, from among more than a thousand manuscripts submitted, for its narrative meticulousness as well as Marcelo Luján’s disquieting gaze, projected in a very persuasive book, which reveals a questioning of the language and a poetics of alienation. The six stories that make up Clarity announce everything that we desire but is out of reach, fears and outbursts, love and betrayal and tiny moments of bliss.
The brightness of Clarity is all the more brighter when seen from the darkness. And it is, precisely, from this broad parameter of the blackness, where a particular and determined use of language, of the narrative voice and of the registers, that he manages to create free or condemned characters, always eternal, in some unexpected, extraordinary, violent and earthly stories that come together to present us with the sharpest side of beauty.
«These five short stories by Marcelo Luján, of an impeccable craftsmanship, are an invite to a reading experience not exempt of a tasty perversion, unsettling the reader with stories that in the context of literature are of a pleasant turn; intense, fascinating, whilst if they were to be part of our daily life, they’d make us want to break out running.»
FERNANDO ARAMBURU