Not many days ago, just after reading it, I showed the cover of this book in my social networks with this title:
"To learn to cook slowly, to read slowly, to write slowly... To want to be slow...
That's where happiness will go."
Those of us who have read Andres Barrero's literary reviews can know some things about him, such as that he is a great reader, that he likes Russian authors, that he reads slowly, tasting the words, the paragraphs, the chapters, that everything knows how to squeeze it to get the necessary juice. That never speaks badly of a book if there is something good to say about it... If we have also read Andres' books, the margin of knowledge can be widened much more...
I'm going to take a risk and I'll tell you what I intuit about the author through his books. That he is meticulous in his writing, that bearing in mind that he writes from thought and experience, Russian literature has served him more to evoke hope in the human being than to delight in crime or punishment. That he values the family and what it brings him, I suppose he also gives himself with all the good he has... To write like Andres does, I intuit that he is a man who goes with his eyes open, who looks at life and at people from the front, and who looks from the affection and from the respect. Only in this way has he been able to construct the three main characters that appear in this novel...
"The name of Berta" - I think it is a novel that surprises the reader because it is different, committed, risky, almost daring. It is also a very literary novel, full of references to authors, novels, poets and even reviews; also, because it seems to go with it, it is a gastronomic novel, you know... of that slow and loving cuisine, like the literature he likes. And yes, it is also a novel written with violet glasses, the same ones that I imagine the author must wear in his daily life...
Berta and Bruno, and ...
Berta's character has been especially endearing to me, with that little voice of her inner self recriminating each of her performances that has confused me so much at the beginning of the story... I liked the formula used to tell the story, chapters told by Berta and Bruno alternately, so that we know the same as the characters and we learn the facts once they occur...
"The name of Berta" is a book in which the ninety-two pages in which this story is presented to us are sufficient to conclude it in an impressive way, I would even say brilliant. Leaving everything as it is, with no solution of continuity.
In life, as in the novel, generally things are not what they seem, and it is that we live often far from the reality suffered by people who approach us for different reasons. In this case, Berta will fall into Bruno's nets, and no, don't think that nets are always bad, sometimes they are used to separate the damaged elements and cure them, without any more pretensions... The back cover tells us that "The name of Berta" is not about what is written in its pages but about what the reader feels when reading them.
And being true, it is no less so that what is written also matters, and what is written, for those who do not want to see beyond the words, black on white, will also satisfy the reader, because it is not poetry what Andrés Barrero presents us with, but a very hard story in which he gradually introduces us, And to want to anticipate the future, even to build it ourselves, because by reading "The name of Berta", we are not going to want to be satisfied with being mere spectators and that life follows its course.
That you already know that Andres is a companion of this house, but I also want to tell you that in this review full of affection I have tried to talk to you about him with all the objectivity that characterizes me ;), although when it comes to books we all know that what always prevails is pure subjectivity?!
And that's why I can only tell you that "The name of Berta" is a very short, very big and very recommendable novella.