Short stories, PÁGINAS DE ESPUMA (March 2018)
Rodrigo Blanco’s literature is the response to a cataclysm.
After his foray into the novel with the extraordinary book The Night, Rodrigo Blanco is back with seven fascinating short stories. This tableau of wonders is inhabited by strange, appealing characters: a taxidermist painter, a blind man lost in the world of Petrarch, a female motorcyclist who rides naked through the night, a foreigner who learns a language making confessions in Paris churches, and a dying pilot who finds peace in a reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Some coexist in the midst of a floundering Venezuela, others with the threat of terrorism in France, or in a Mexico symbolizing the first shots of the revolution. All are characters emerging from the black well of literature.
Impeccable and masterful in his storytelling, Rodrigo Blanco constructs a nocturnal cast of characters who become the victims and executioners of a sacrifice, of the atonement that is life anytime, anywhere, in which we are all “calves”.
“After reading the stories by Rodrigo Blanco, one harbours the nostalgia for those faraway days in which one could read just by the pleasure of reading.” El Nacional
“The Night is more than a promising debut. It is a novel that already fulfils a lot and at least deserves cult status.” Maarten Steenmeijer De Volskrant