Putinoika Reviews
Latino Book Review Putinoika
Giannina Braschi
Putinoika is a luminous book. Its light comes from an apparent chaos, a mirror of our time, written in a precise, profane, and sweetly convulsive language.
We know that Aristotle was the first to speak about the theory of literary genres in his classic book Poetics. He said that literary works should have clarity and also elegance. That is, that the work should not be so dark or confusing. Aristotle spoke of a balance between these literary manifestations. We can see that the trance between prose and poetry has not changed much since then. There are texts that are apparently incomprehensible, and make you want to run away through the dark forest and never come back.
There are also books that within their complexity fill us with light and humanity. One of these cases is Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Here we have a masterpiece as a model, which concentrates and plays with several literary genres constructed in an unbalanced manner on purpose. In Don Quixote, we find the presence of several literary genres intertwined, and which are sustained from beginning to end. Don Quixote, read so many times, never ceases to open new paths for its study. Here we find fantasy, a powerful critique of power, and of politics in general. Don Quixote is a dialogical book par excellence. At the other extreme, but also a mixed-genre epic work Joyce’s Ulysses returns the Odyssey to the streets of Dublin, and Telemachus continues to search for his father through the same streets of the modern city.
In Putinoika, voices from Greek mythology such as Cassandra, Antigone, or Electra congregate, interspersed with fundamental characters of Western thought and culture such as Nietzsche, Picasso, El Greco, or Maria Callas. Within this exhaustive and profound dialogue appears the voice of the author, who does not give up in the face of dilemma or doubt. Her prophecies are fulfilled by tracing her own poetics: intuition first, then reason.
“Reason is such a disappointing method. It has let us all down. It never was a companion of truth but of establishment. It was used to establish order in the court of law, but it established chaos of lies—one after another. And its companion, facts, were created to build the case so that reason would state its law and order with precision, stately, in accordance to the establishment. They both work surreptitiously, looking around with sneaky eyes afraid of being caught with the hands in the money jar,” Braschi writes.
Putinoika is a luminous book. Its light comes from an apparent chaos, a mirror of our time, written in a precise, profane, and sweetly convulsive language.
| Putinoika Reviewed by Miguel-Angel Zapata Miguel-Angel Zapata is Professor of Latin American Literature at Hofstra University. He has recently published El Florero amenaza con hablar (Lima: Máquina Purísima, 2024); Usted no sabe cuánto pesa un corazón solitario. Ensayos sobre poesía(Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2023); Trilce. Ensayos(México: Universidad de Querétaro-Ed. El Tucán de Virginia, 2023); and La Iguana de Casandra. Poesía selecta (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2021). He is the founding director of Códice- Revista de Poesía. He won the Enrique Anderson Award from the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE).Comments |
- https://www.latinxpopmag.com/post/sophia-yip-reviews-braschi-putinoika
- https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/interviews/give-me-more-putinas-por-favor-conversation-giannina-braschi-sandra-guzman
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- https://www.latinobookreview.com/putinoika—giannina-braschi–latino-book-review.html?
- https://www.nuevarevista.net/alto-y-claro-la-narrativa-reciente-de-giannina-braschi-entre-otros-discursos-anti-distopicos/
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