THE COMMUNITY. In spite of being a title that many books could carry I believe that I had not read any with him. Of course, in the cinema I do remember Alex de la Iglesia's film... It's rare that there aren't more books with that title, because if there's something that plays enough to write an infinite number of stories of different kinds, that's a community of neighbors.
It's not easy to live in the community. It's not easy to be a neighbor, and it's not easy at all to put up with some neighbors who might touch you in luck. No matter how well you get along with them, there are always frictions. And it is logical, if they arise between people who are loved, who are family or friends and who live in the same house, imagine sharing spaces, even if they are only common and of which we are separated only by a partition, with people with whom we have nothing to do.
So, we can think that Diego Palacios Marxuach, the author, had it easy, but the good thing about the book is that it's not what almost everyone expects, because naturally he is describing the characters from The Community, and he is doing it by location, so the first one he presents to us is the neighbor on the second left, Hector. A kind of normal appearance, because we all know that a book can't start at the top, but starting on the second floor isn't bad at all. Then to Ela, her neighbor upstairs, a floor she had to climb because there's a water filtration on hers... And from then on we realize that the book is going to take us beyond what we might have thought.
It's not a very big community so soon we'll meet all the neighbors, Max and Lucho, a gay couple who live in the first landed neighbors of Priotr and Agatha a young couple parents of a little girl. Eduardo and Casandra are the last inhabitants of this curious community.
From the beginning, we noticed a tone of writing that, for those who have read nothing about it, may surprise. A very direct style in which, at the same time as it introduces us into the life of each one of the neighbors, it curls up what will later be the central plot of the book.
In fact, I have always communicated with Diego through was saps and e-mails, and already in them you can detect that punk point but at the same time very concentrated, concrete and concise, full of that sly black humor that is so lacking in literature, you know, that light writing in the details and deep writing in the short reflections that young people like so much today.
And you read this guy (Diego) with an elegant demeanor and street vocabulary but very selected, and you realize that he likes good music, that he looks at life in a very critical way, and that, although I imagine that publicly he would rather die than say that he is a romantic lover of good poetry, I have to tell you that someone who closes his work with a fragment of the lyrics of Bunbury, turns us before our eyes readers into an apprentice of the great Poe... And I am grateful that there are those who want to continue surprising us with different stories.
It is true that we all know more about our neighbors than they think, but less than we would like. There we have programs like Big Brother that showed that people are interested in the lives of others, I remember that when I saw in the cinema the premiere of Truman's Show, with this I already tell them that I have an age, a person who accompanied me commented that it was not logical that so many people were interested in seeing what someone did in their day to day, the premiere was in 1998, it is clear that I was not right, two years later, as you well know, the first mission of Big Brother beat all the records of audience .
You see, in short, we all like to know what is going on from the inside out, and the more mystery it seems, the more interest it generates. And this is the book that Diego presents to us, a book that is generating curiosity and the need to continue to know where the events that are happening to the characters of The Community will take us.
THE COMMUNITY, an interesting, different and entertaining book for these crazy and dark summer nights.