December is a time for balance and also for looking ahead, scheduling readings and, why not, evaluating what has been read (Don't despair, there are always pending. Always). For the brotherhood of book lovers, title lists are consultation and assistance tools; Knowing what qualified readers read and recommend excites us and helps us when making our own choice. In the tour that we do every year end from this section, this time we choose to go one step further and not only ask several personalities about their favorite books but also try an analysis of those results. Thus, the Infobae Cultura team invited 64 prominent actors in different areas of the cultural industry to select three titles from among their readings this year. They were not asked to justify the choice, there was total freedom in terms of literary genre and also when choosing the origin of the authors or the books.

The heart of damage , by María Negroni, Girls in suspended times , by Tamara Kamenszain, I will remember for you, by Juan Forn , The ladies , by Laura Ramos , The lineage , by Carla Maliandi, El Di Tella , by Fernando García, The another war , by Leila Guerriero, Yoga , by Emmanuel Carrère and An ideal presence , by Eduardo Berti were the most voted books in this great production. (The votes of each of them can be seen in this note) . In keeping with the times, not only was the selection of the juries equal, but the results as well. For those who follow the evolution of the world of books, it cannot be said that it is a surprise, although it is a recognition of great fiction and non-fiction texts written by great authors. Most of the voted books had space in this section through notes and interviews.

The two most voted books were books written by women poets , one of them (María Negroni), recent winner of two municipal prizes and the other, (Tamara Kamenszain), who died a few days after the publication of her celebrated essay in verse. The third most voted book was written by another beloved writer (Juan Forn) who died this year. There were two popular titles linked to Argentine political and cultural history ( El Di Tella, by Fernando García and La Otra Guerra, by Leila Guerriero), a novel that has points of contact with the history of this country ( La estirpe , by Carla Guerriero). Maliandi), a novel framed in the literature of the self written by the great exponent of the non-fiction novel genre and bestseller, Frenchman Emmanuel Carrere , and a book of unclassifiable genre, perhaps the most surprising, written from real testimonies in a palliative care unit, and which curiously, despite dealing with stories on the verge of death, is a luminous book, like the one by Eduardo Berti.

As can be seen, except for Carrère's book, the rest of the titles are by Argentine authors, something that was reproduced in the total result of the production. In the same way, there were many books from large publishing groups, but there were also highly rated books that were published by independent publishers. If one begins to do a fine tour among all the titles that were voted ( I invite you again to go read the corresponding note ) , you will find books by established authors, with new authors, with first novels, with publishers that launched the first books in their catalog this year and also with a curiosity: the so-called White Book , a high-quality fiction text published by the Seix Barral publishing house as an experiment without the name of the author or title, although some traces inside of the story act as signs that for a trained reader could be enough to unveil the enigma (will its author or author be among the voters of this poll?).

Other books that received several votes were:

Self Portrait , by Celia Paul; It lives and translates , by Laura Wittner; Crossroads , by Jonathan Franzen; Mr. and Mrs. Baby , by Mark Strand; Los Llanos , by Federico Falco (2020 book, but for having won several awards it was also widely read this year); Other Things to Cry About, by Luciana De Luca; The obligation to be great , by Betina González; Has the rebellion turned to the right? , by Pablo Stefanoni; The wave that reads , by César Aira; The Painted Woman , by Teresa Arijón; Little Things Like That , by Claire Keegan; A house away from home , by Clara Obligado; A love , by Sara Mesa; Sontag. Life and Work , by Benjamin Moser; Hamnet , by Maggie O'Farrell; Part of happiness, by Dolores Gil; The white book (anonymous author); Gratitudes , by Delphine de Vigan; Wilcock, by Adolfo Bioy Casares and American Folk Art, by Hernán Vanoli.

Next, I invite you to learn more about the nine most voted titles, through brief reviews (and something else) about them.

The Heart of Damage , by María Negroni

A volcanic phrase condenses the core of this novel, one of the most voted by the experts consulted by Infobae . ”My mother: the most fervent and most harmful occupation of my life. I will never love anyone like her (…) I will never know why my life is not my life but a counterpoint to hers, why nothing I do reaches her”

Since its publication, The heart of the damage won the admiration of readers through a sophisticated approach to autobiographical materials from fiction and a proposal that responds to the view of the world of Maria Negroni as a poet: blowing up language. This time, the classic hybridity of Negroni's texts -her creed is not genres but the idea of ​​writing- points to autobiography and, with it, the work of literature on the truth of the events that are narrated. Once again, as in all of her work, there is a work with language, which is explored by tensing the limits with an object: to rescue the words of common sense.

“My mother waves her hands. They are the loneliest hands in the world.”

“Poetry is the continuation of childhood by other means”

"A book is a beautiful graveyard"

There is a narrator in the first person who is the protagonist and another protagonist, central, who is the one towards whom the story is directed: a mother, the mother of the narrator. In The Heart of Harm , childhood and the militancy of the 70s are key elements of the story with all that they entail: training, family, exile, return, memory.

Poet, essayist, narrator, teacher, María Negroni was born in Rosario and lived for many years in New York. She is the author of books such as Joseph Cornell Elegy, Iceland, Satie Object, Ursula's Dream, The Annunciation, Dickinson File, and Little Illustrated World (which has just been reissued).

Her work was awarded several times, both in Argentina and in other countries; in fact, she has just received two municipal prizes, one in Essay and the other in Poetry. Many of her books have been translated into other languages ​​and she herself is a great translator of poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath or Marianne Moore among others. She has a doctorate in Latin American literature from Columbia University, she is the creator and director of the Master's Program in Creative Writing at UNTREF, that is to say that while she writes, she teaches reading and writing.

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Girls in Suspended Times , by Tamara Kamenszain

In the times we live in, books rarely circulate from hand to hand in the manner of a samizdat or by word of mouth, like a spell. That happened with this wonderful essay in verse by Tamara Kamenszain , a book written during the most critical time of the pandemic and that came to light almost in tune with the unexpected death of its author. "Women do not write / to convince anyone," she says in one of the poems in which she reflects on the great names of poets / poetesses who preceded her, the fight for words and meanings and, also, the fight for space , by name, by a place away from the usual literary table to which female writers were assigned so that they could continue arguing among themselves - among us - whether or not there is female poetry or literature while male authors reserved the great debates about the form, the structure, the politics of the language and the monopoly of literature that interests everyone.

She wrote it like this:

poetess is a sweet word

that we put aside because she embarrassed us

and yet and yet

she now she comes back in a handkerchief

that our ancestors tied

to the throat of her hoarse lyrics.

If he calls me, you tell him that I'm out

Alfonsina had asked while she committed suicide

and that scared us.

Better poets than poetesses

then we agreed between us

to make sure even if she is a little place

in the long-awaited underworld of the canon.

And yet and yet

again we are left out:

we did not know that the poets

they like to become vates

while the girls in inclusive language

the word vata does not ring a bell

why women don't write

to convince anyone.

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That's why the poetess that we all carry inside

looking to come out of the closet right now

towards a new destiny that was already written

and that on the edge of her own history revisited

she never got tired of waiting for us.

Tamara was in Argentina one of the names of poetry. For my generation, those born in the 1960s, she was one of the names in poetry and also in literature; In addition to her poetic talent, she had an admirable way of practicing literary criticism and cultural journalism, with the Argentine language in splendor and without arrogance, like someone who shares a treasure because the joy is greater.

Teacher of generations of hopeful poets of verse, Tamara gave lectures in her talks, her comments and her journalistic articles, as in the case of the last one she wrote or, at least, the last one that was made public, regarding the reissue of the book by Mariana Eva Pérez , Diary of a Montonera Princess , in which she conceived an outreach text as a powerful piece of analysis on the verge of perfection, which articulated literature, politics, culture and society in a brilliant set of ideas.

I interviewed her in 2018, when El libro de Tamar came out, when the poet and essayist Tamara began to draw the narrator Tamara in that short and autobiographical book that tells a long love story, extinguished by failure and mourning. I look at the photos of that day and I remember her smiling (Tamara was a girl who smiled a lot, she was a pure smile, and I think, judging by her last book of poems, that she would like it to be said that, that she was still a girl) saying that with that book a duel ended.

She spoke of great relief. And she spoke of the reader as her hero. Tamara was one of the names of poetry and she did not write just for herself or for a chosen circle. “I like it and it amuses me to think that the other is interested, understands, knows what I am talking about, or can transmit something useful to him. I don't know what to call it, it's not self-help but there's something about that too,” she said that day.

Earlier, another day, she wrote:

write poetry for me

is giving and receiving a promise

of survival

Girls in Suspended Times crossed the ocean of taste and readers' preferences as it was also chosen among the best books of the year in the survey carried out by Babelia, the literary supplement of the Madrid newspaper El País.

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I will remember for you , by Juan Forn

For many years, Juan Forn told us the story of the world and its inhabitants from the back covers of Page 12 on Fridays. Actually, what Juan did was narrate extraordinary stories of life, art and literature of the last century, through a classic and unique style at the same time. "I am amused by the idea that the back covers were like little footnotes in a book like Hobsbawm's 'Twentieth-Century History,'" he said. Knowing that no division discouraged lovers of good literature, its back covers became a space that managed to circumvent the political and taste gap through attractive, rich and mature texts, in a society that was beginning to go through a strict fissure that endures and impoverishes. The 20th century went through those back covers in which Forn took refuge to overcome an illness (pancreatitis), a deep malaise with his own person and that also meant distancing himself from fiction, which at the beginning had been the space that led him towards readers through texts such as Nadar de noche, Frivolidad or María Domecq.

Forn's back covers came naturally to book format through four volumes entitled Fridays and, later, after an already more anthological publishing experience in Chile with the editor Andrea Palet that left him enthusiastic, he proposed to rebuild the map of their Fridays with a different meaning. It was then that he also wanted to be the final editor of those back covers, just as he had been editor of the Radar supplement of the newspaper in which he wrote or in fundamental collections such as Biblioteca del Sur, in the 90s, and in Rara Avis, already closer in the time where he was in charge of giving life to books by Vasco Pratolini or Isidoro Blaisten , among others, as well as discovering extraordinary talents such as Camila Sosa Villada and her award-winning Las malas.

He was a writer but above all he was a great reader. In real life, in his emails, Juan wrote as if he were speaking and he did so in lower case, avoiding some accents. On Friday, April 16 of this year -yes, a Friday- he replied to an email in which he proposed that he come to my radio program once again:

“As for the interview, I would prefer it to be in August-September because on that date I am going to publish something I did with Fridays: I chose my 99 favorites and put them in a row, only separated by two spaces, following the following order: I start in Africa, I go to the East, from Japan I go to Russia, from Russia to Mitteleuropa, from there to Italy, France, Spain, England, I jump to the USA, I go down through Mexico, I do Latin America, I end up in Argentina and the autobiographical ones (my old , my life here on the beach). in this way the book makes a trip around the world that at the same time works as a walk through the century.

It will be called “I will remember for you” and it has about 400 pgs. I was very happy, because I was never completely satisfied with the Friday volumes, they seemed like mere compilations or selections. now I think it's something else, something autonomous, with its own movement, a real book. what do I know.”

His book, the definitive one, appeared in August, indeed, but he was no longer there to receive it and celebrate. He had died unexpectedly on Sunday, June 20, Father's Day, after having lunch with his loved ones at Mar de las Pampas, a beach near Villa Gesell, where he found refuge when he decided that the city was no longer a place for him.

Through his back covers, Juan managed to put together an encyclopedia of the 20th century in his own way and with his tastes, which ended up being those of many of us, in some cases perhaps due to generational coincidence and, in others, because Forn was, from the various spaces that he occupied in the cultural industry, a great shaper of Argentine reading taste in recent decades. Once, in one of the interviews we did in recent years, I asked him why he loved him for those years, for that century.

— I read in an interview that they did to you that you thought of the 20th century as the historical moment that condenses everything that interests you to read.

-It's that, look, I'll give you a very specific example, I read Fitzgerald , or I read Joseph Roth , which I like a lot. And I feel like I've reached that time. I feel the flannel of the clothes, the color of the tablecloth, the level of conversation, the prejudices and fears. I know what the word Jew means, what the word sex means, what the word money means. I go 30 years back and I am already a foreigner; I follow him but I am already in the world, what do I know, of Maupassant, the world of Baudelaire. These are other times for me. I enjoy them but it is only literature, on the other hand the other is literature and it is my time, so for me they become more eloquent and I am interested in all the corners of that room.

Forn is gone and to the enthusiasm for his texts is added the nostalgia and sadness for his death and the loss of his gaze on “every corner” of that room. His readers remain faithful to those enormous life stories that he narrated like no one else and his book, which bears the title of one of the chapters, the one that deals with the Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas who, in his youth, read everything that happened by his hands because he had proposed to be something like the living memory of his people, he turned out to be one of the most read, most commented, most recommended and also most loved of this 2021 that is leaving.

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The Ladies , by Laura Ramos

Laura Ramos has been one of the great Argentine journalists for many years, and those of us who share a job with her know this and, above all, those who passionately remember her columns from the 1980s and 1990s “Buenos Aires kills me” and “Ciudad Paraíso”, with which he modernized the approach of the world of rock and culture to large audiences in the mass media, while at the same time inspiring generations of journalists who saw in the freshness and originality of his prose a key stimulus. for experimentation with writing itself.

Beginning with her spectacular work as a biographer of the Branwell siblings, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë , in her celebrated book Infernal , which took her eight years of research and work, Laura Ramos began a new stage in her career that was definitively consolidated with the appearance of Las senoritas , a book in which she reconstructs the lives of twenty of the sixty-one North American teachers who They arrived in Argentina between 1869 and 1898, based on the educational plan of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.

The presence of these women, all of them from enlightened families, most of them downtrodden, and with a great pedagogical vocation, sowed the seed of education in the country, although not only public education, which was the original idea, but also from a large part of private education, since some of them finally applied their knowledge in that sphere. One of the key themes of this pioneering presence was what Sarmiento did not foresee as an obstacle: religion. In a Catholic country like Argentina, the arrival of Protestant teachers was seen by the Church in several provinces as a provocation, an imposition to overcome in the name of faith.

In Las senoritas , once again, Laura Ramos leads the readers through an exciting narrative, works with unknown documents with the rigor of a historian and manages to transmit knowledge from the life stories of dazzling women and reflect the spirit of the 19th century ideas with the usual talent.

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The lineage, by Carla Maliandi

Carla Maliandi was born in 1976 in Venezuela, but she is Argentine. She is a writer, playwright, theater director and teacher. She premiered seven plays and participated in national and international festivals. His first novel, The German Room , was published in 2017 and was one of the great literary surprises for critics -due to its exceptional style and treatment of themes, as well as its use of harsh, precise and elegant language. - and also for the readers.

La estirpe, Maliandi's new novel, sustains and grows the praise won with her first fiction. This time, the protagonist is Ana, an academic and writer, married and mother of a child, who loses her memory in a ridiculous accident during her 40th birthday party. No one understands why she no longer recognizes anyone or knows who she is. neither the doctors nor the family. Ana loses her memory and also loses her language, although she begins to speak in another language, and, even more, to recover memories that are not her own. Or if.

It is a novel that deals in an original way with the extermination of native peoples in northern Argentina, based on the "accident" suffered by an intellectual. The place it had in the expert readers' choice is not surprising, since Maliandi's is a book that is read passionately in a row, which surprises, moves and makes one think of personal history but also of Argentine history, of the paradoxical construction of tastes and feelings and in the powerful life of words.

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Yoga by Emmanuel Carrere

It is a moving book that also generated controversy. In Yoga , the great French journalist and writer recounts his descent into the inferno of madness and reflects on the couple's spiritual search, love and failure while overcoming an unexpected hurdle: the court settlement by which his ex woman has the right to veto fragments of her works that include her. Yoga is a captivating first-person story that is divided into three parts, which, in turn, are made up of very short chapters that each have a title (by the way, reading those titles is a fascinating reading experience). Due to the book's editing process, during which its author had to cut scenes, characters and texts due to a singular divorce agreement, Carrère's novel is a resilient text that is like a precise punch in the arguments of those who dictate the twilight of the literary style that consecrated it.

Still in postpartum due to El Reino , Carrere set out to write "a smiling and subtle little book" about yoga, a practice that she has followed for more than three decades, and that, due to a series of events, some unexpected, others unmanageable, ended up becoming in the dramatic, moving, spiritual and also problematic book that was talked about and written around the world this year . A book that has everything: a person's life doesn't always happen and in a short time a massacre in which a great friend dies, a season in the hell of madness and a traumatic divorce.

Although Yoga -which was about to be called Yoga for bipolars- began to be written in 2015, it was only published last year, in the framework of the pandemic that still has the world in parentheses. During all that time, its author gave in to the impulse of self-destruction, he knew the limits of madness, he lost his family life and part of his memories as a result of psychiatric treatment, but he also learned to breathe again, to fall in love again and even to write. with all fingers in tribute to his beloved and missed editor.

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El Di Tella , by Fernando Garcia

Fernando García is a journalist and writer. He is the author of the canonical biography of Antonio Berni, Los ojos, and is also a great researcher of culture, fundamentally dedicated to topics that have to do with music and contemporary art. He defines himself as a pop archaeologist and it is in this direction that he has been researching trends and great cultural histories of the recent past for years.

This year and after an arduous process full of discoveries, García published El Di Tella. Intimate history of a cultural phenomenon, a book as rigorous and monumental as it is entertaining in which, based on the work with documents and dozens of interviews -several of them primary sources-, it manages to reconstruct the period of splendor of the Di Tella Institute, the epicenter of the Argentine artistic avant-garde of the time in terms of art, theater, music and dance, when another country seemed possible.

Names such as Marta Minujin, Delia Cancela, Juan Carlos Distéfano, Nacha Guevara, Oscar Bony, Jorge Bonino, Alberto Breccia, Jorge de la Vega, Griselda Gambaro, Gerardo Gandini, Nicolás García Uriburu, Gyula Kosice, Julio Le Parc, Julio Llinás , Rómulo Macció, I Musicisti (future Les Luthiers), Oscar Masotta, Hugo Midón, Roberto Jacoby, Marikena Monti, Luis Felipe Noé, Marilú Marini, Alberto Ginastera, Federico Peralta Ramos, Josefina Robirosa, Alfredo Rodríguez Arias, Dalila Puzzovio, Antonio Seguí among others, they appear on its pages, as well as the groups Almendra and Manal. The book details the way in which aesthetic modernity passed through that emblematic building on Florida Street at 900 between 1963 and 1970, in tune with the expansion of the greatest artistic bomb of pop: The Beatles.

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An Ideal Presence , by Eduardo Berti

There is a question with which a reader enters the adventure of this unclassifiable book: what is the place of life where everything reminds of death? An Ideal Presence , by Eduardo Berti , is a delicate and moving text. Translated by Claudia Ramón Schwartzman , since Berti wrote it in French in order to preserve the original orality of the testimonies, An Ideal Presence is a moving choral story that is the result of his residence as a writer in the palliative care unit of a university hospital in Rouen, France.

The voices of the health and administrative staff of the place and also those of the volunteers who come to give what they know how to do to the people who are hospitalized there make up an extraordinary and sensitive fabric in a space in which death is not a distant future and alien. The deepest reflections occur within the framework of this place where in most cases there is no possible cure. In a delicate intersection of reality and fiction, Berti's is a book that achieves the impossible: to produce a luminous literature, of smiles and tears, from stories and testimonies that occur on the threshold of death.

Two snippets, as an example:

“When I hear that palliative care is the unit you go to before you die, instead of getting angry, instead of starting to explain more or less patiently that we also treat pain in cases that don't involve imminent death; Instead, I agree with them, put on my best smile, politely say that it is so, that it is well observed, and then immediately add that, in fact, the same could be said of all hospital services, of any hospital, because, ultimately, everything that deserves to be called life is the set of things we do before we die, right? Well, I assure you that this always has its small effect” (Mireille Gosselin, Head of the Unit)

“No, I don't talk about the things that happen here in the hospital with my friends or with my family, except with my mother. She was the only one who two years ago did not advise me not to enter this unit. And she is the only one whose questions go beyond the usual generalities. The others don't ask almost anything, they don't understand anything. I think they don't really want to understand. Talking about death and suffering is not for everyone. So I shut up. I protect them.” (Linda Mouilleron, extern)

Eduardo Berti is Argentine and has lived in Paris for twenty years. Born in Buenos Aires in 1964, he began his career as a journalist and there is practically no literary genre or word work in which he has not ventured with quality and talent . Chronicler, screenwriter, essayist and narrator, his work as a journalist specialized in music and culture was left behind in time and today his books have international prestige and recognition. His first book, in the mid-1990s, was a set of stories, The Birds and Then Water Came, The Woman from Wakefield, All the Funes, The Boxer's Shadow, A Foreign Father, Faster, Rockology, The Character Typewriter Chinese, Circle of Readers and Por, among others.

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The Other War, by Leila Guerriero

The download of this book by the great Argentine chronicler is “A history of the Argentine cemetery in Malvinas”. It is a small volume that tells an enormous story, that of the deed that led after years of effort and frustration to identify the remains of the Argentine soldiers who fell in the 1982 war so that today the families of those dead can have a place to mourn them.

With a surprising listening and unparalleled narrative skills, Guerriero interviews several of the protagonists of this story with the exact dose of sensitivity and distance, which allows him to obtain an extraordinary chronicle based on documents and real events, but worked with the tools and narrative tension of a novel. A text that Guerriero worked on for more than two years and in which she delicately addresses the pain of absence, the misunderstandings that divide families when tragedy interrupts the course of life, and the problem of narrating to the victims .

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*These are the names of the experts and great readers who voted in this production, to whom we are deeply grateful:

Flavia Pittella, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Patricio Zunini, Santiago Llach, Matilde Sánchez, Claudia Piñeiro, Lala Toutonian, Mariana Enríquez, Hinde Pomeraniec, Malena Rey, Patricia Kolesnicov, Edgardo Scott, Ana Correa, Agustina Larrea, Pedro B. Rey, Florencia Ure Julieta Grosso, Luis Mey, Diego Rojas, Facundo Basualdo, Gustavo Noriega, Miriam Molero, Tamara Tenenbaum, Víctor Malumián, Eugenia Zicavo, Martín Kohan, Silvina Friera, Juan Gabriel Batalla, Santiago Craig, Maxi Legnani, Cecilia Fanti, Ezequiel Martínez, Cristina Mucci, Gabriela Saidon (Author), Pablo Perantuono, Natalia Ginzburg, Verónica Abdala, Juan Becerra, Mauro Libertella, Luciano Sáliche, Valeria Delgado, Ana Clara Perez Cotten, Matías Serra Bradford, Pablo Gianera, Eva Marabotto, Alejandro Dujovne, Matías Bauso , Máximo Soto, Horacio Convertini, Emilia Racciatti, Florencia Scarpatti, Walter Lezcano, Nicolás Mavrakis, Eugenia Almeida, Adriana Lorusso, Alejandro Bellotti, Ana Da Costa, Daniel Divinsky, Laura Galarza, Milena Heinrich, Valeria Tentoni, Carlos Aletto, Maximiliano Tomas, Nicolás Hochman

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*Producción: Juan Gabriel Batalla, Luciano Sáliche, Julieta Botto, Manuela Rodríguez, José Loschi

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