El viaje a pie de Johann Sebastian
Carlos Pardo
NOVEL | 2014 | 240 pages
El viaje a pie de Johann Sebastian narrates a story with a reality that, at this time, is much more than a symptom. Can the story of an eccentric family become the symbol of a country and an era? Is originality the most ordinary obligation? Does one narrate a life or against one? Humor and sadness intermingle in these pages to offer us a portrait, simultaneously scathing and sentimental, of a not-so-typical Spanish family.
The narrator, about to turn forty, doesn't only look back at the past to recount his own sentimental education. He also traces the entire society that lived through the change of a century with a scalpel — a society that treated the new century as a change from a state of wellness to a state of crisis, always believing without a doubt that "the others" were guilty.
The plot? A lower-class mother gets engaged to the man who lives in the house where she works, a young engineer. They will have five children: two rock musicians, a mechanic, a waiter, and a librarian. None of them will finish their studies. Time goes on, the parents get divorced. The mother grows ill. The father, who has retired and is a successful triathlete, also falls ill: he has a heart attack while riding his bike. Now, the children are the ones who will take care of their parents...
But the plot, in this case, is what comes before the novel, the place from which you want to flee, and El viaje a pie de Johann Sebastian narrates these forms of escape: through music, politics, seduction, art, even neighborhood foolishness and a particular kind of bohemia. In the middle of this story about the decline of a family (many families, in reality), we witness another story that appears to be different but is crucial, a small allegorical artifact that introduces subtle modulations in the rest of the plot and radically alters the supposed realists in the narration: Johann Sebastian Bach, twenty years old, travels from Arnstadt to Lübeck to succeed his master, the organist Buxtehude. A 350-kilometer journey on foot with an unexpected end. Another escape through fiction.
RIGHTS: spanish EDITORIAL PERIFÉRICA
“Carlos Pardo has written a brilliant novel that lives up to today’s standards. And above all, up to the standards of the new demands that the novel as a genre is still obligated to confront.”
“Writing that makes us question where the individual, the collective, and art can intersect. Without a doubt, one of the novels of the year.”
“A demolishing legacy, given that what Carlos Pardo describes is the disintegration of a middle-class Spanish family - his own - through developmentalism: a particular case becomes the emblem of a particular time in History. A markedly excellent book.”
“A re-encounter with good literature.”
BY CARLOS PARDO:
Lejos de Kakania
NOVEL, 2019
El viaje a pie de Johann Sebastian
NOVEL, 2014
Vida de Pablo
NOVEL, 2011