La figura del mundo
Juan Villoro
FICTION | 2023 | 200 pages
To what extent can we recover a memory that doesn’t belong to us? Is it possible to understand what a father has been without us? To be a son means to descend, to alter time, to create a disruption, a mismatch that is corrected with pedagogy, sometimes with affection or with the transmission of knowledge.
In La figura del mundo, Juan Villoro recounts the secret order of things and some memorable passages about his father, the Mexican-Catalan thinker Luis Villoro. Without the goal of creating a biography in the strictest sense of the word, Juan evokes the unique life of a former philosopher, social fighter, Zapatista, and author of fundamental work.
With this book, Villoro offers us a glimpse of a figure that is both intimate and public, delving into the complexities that all lives have and masterfully narrating moments that unfold in order to understand the ubiquity of the present. Thus, he recovers here the essence of a father who was present in his family life in an intangible way. This is a father who must be investigated by a son who senses his affections and therefore tries to renew the past.
Written with great sensitivity and sharpness, this book condenses the astonishment and emotion of an author who feels writing is “a never-ending letter to the father.”
RIGHTS: spanish PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
“The literary excellence of the author, the intellectual magnitude of his father, and the compositional technique of this inquisition into memory and identity make this book a fascinating work. The backbone that supports it is the retrospective search for answers to the multitude of questions that surround an admired and enigmatic father. The evocation of episodes, not subject to chronological order, is sprinkled with generic reflections and precise judgments, without fear of getting lost in the branches that sprout from that backbone.”
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