The puppeteer Dingo's carriage hits a young child while passing through the village of Artemilla, the miserable village from which he fled years ago to join a troupe of acrobats, aspiring to make his entire life a continuous festival. He resorts to his old friend, Juan Medinao, to help him in this predicament, but his contact with the village master will finally awaken the details of the painful past, and with them he will begin a relentless journey through memory, recalling his relationship with his father, his mother’s suicide, and the mixture of hatred and love that he felt towards his brother. Stepbrother.
In this small-sized novel, but with a big impact, Anna Maria Matute is able to delve into the depths of her characters, searching for the deep scars that childhood leaves in their souls, revealing with keen insight and high sensitivity the most complex and profound human feelings, in a dense narrative that makes room for emotional feelings. Inferiority, fear, isolation, and hatred can tell their story too.
Boatman:
Whoever reflects on what people say and do, arrives at the almost certain conclusion that they say one thing and do the complete opposite. You find them praising the philosophy of such-and-such thinker and the depth of his theses, but they do not follow his programs or read his publications. In return, they criticize such-and-such artist’s lifestyle and superficiality. Her ideas...but at the same time they follow all of her work, and do not miss an episode of it.
Personally, I am not surprised by this contradiction, for a fundamental reason... which is that it is an inherent part of human nature in all places and times... and the words that I am writing now, the great sociologist Abdul Rahman bin Khaldun preceded me six centuries ago, and perhaps many scholars before and after him... Therefore, we must recognize that the inherent natures of human beings do not change radically, but rather develop and improve if they find something that helps them to develop and improve.
It often happens that human natures remain as they are, stagnant, if they do not find the intellectual and moral nourishment that elevates them to the highest level. It also happens that they relapse, become brutal, and go back for many years if the nourishment is negative and worse off than before.
Consider the condition of the societies around us. Some of them have a better present than their past, and others have a better past than their present. The whole reason is due to the nature of the intellectual and moral nourishment to which their members are exposed.
في هذا الكتاب محاولة لاختزال ثلاثة آلاف عام من التاريخ الإنساني بقصص منتقاة عن كيفية اكتساب المرء للقوة، أو تفهمه لها من مختلف جوانبها أو حماية نفسه من عسفها وتسلطها أو الحفاظ عليها وممارستها بحكمة وتعقل، أو تحييدها لاتقاء شرّها.
