“Creatures of the moment”: an excellent novel by Aurora Delgado – | ACHTUNG!

2024-04-02 12:33:03

Aurora Delgado, a Sevillian raised in Camas, was determined to pursue higher studies in Dramatic Art, but a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Seville guided her towards her true passion: writing stories. Win the 2013 Alcalá de Henares Fiction Prize for The Heart of Livingstone (Books of the Wound-2014) and having been a finalist for the 2017 Nadal Prize for Curve (Sloper, 2018) show that he did not miss the mark.

I sing a mea culpa and beg forgiveness: I did not know this extraordinary writer and her latest work has fascinated me. Creatures of the Instant (Books of the Wound-2023) has in its pages the imprint of the great writers, with a very careful development of the characters, sometimes complex and multidimensional, who are involved in a series of inexplicable events, with jumps well explained in time, weaving stories and immersing the reader in a masterfully developed plot.

In Instant Creatures Aurora plays with the reader’s mind, mixing past and present with a series of revelations and discoveries that keep him in suspense. As the story progresses, the reasons for the characters’ behavior become understood, unraveling deep secrets. A “forbidden” love story is intertwined between Helena Malaver y Blanca Ivanova with real events seasoned by the very fertile imagination of Aurora Delgado.

Another aspect to point out is the use of historical figures, in this case members of the PCE, as luxurious “secondaries” of the plot: Vicente Uribe, Santiago Carrillo, Francisco Antón and above all Dolores Ibarruri The Passionflower. And don’t forget the imposing presence of Joseph Stalinsurrounded by all the bureaucracy and meticulous post-war Soviet security, with which Aurora ironizes through the epithets commonly used at the time dedicated to the dictator: The One, The Builder of Socialism, The Red Tsar, The Wise, The Teacher, The Protector…

A Soviet Novel, Helena Malaver’s memoir imagined by Aurora, is transfigured into another character, since through references to its pages a good part of the events of the love story between Helena and Blanca are clarified, which, given the prejudices of the time, they had to keep it secret. Likewise, in her memoirs, the Dulcinea snacksname of the Spanish potato tortillas that Elena sold to the Soviets and Stalin loved, takes an important leading role, whose purpose we will not reveal for the sake of the plot.

Aurora takes a turn at the end of the work, with the ins and outs of the protagonist’s love relationship and complicated departure from Moscow already broken down and known, focusing on a matter that is, a priori, disconcerting: Dolores Ibarruri’s supposed ability to levitate. And I say a priori because of a woman with so much power and capacity, so sacrificed for the cause and so idealized and called The Mother of Communismtheories have been invented about his superhuman abilities, at a time when the legendary turned into a “true story” at the first opportunity.

As Aurora explains in the novel, in the words of the character Dr. Rouqués:

Maybe everything we experience is inertia, astral displacements of our consciousness through a current that is not really life, but impulse, random combinations of the multiplicity of possible futures…

All this and much more is offered by Aurora Delgado’s novel, an author to follow very closely, because if her work has become relevant in such a short time, we can expect her to evolve into a consolidated, well-known writer whose books are awaited. by its readers, among whom we include, of course, ACHTUNG!.

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