“The myth of the forgotten klassikerns return true”
“the Artist Emma Reyes is celebrating 100 years. Inga-Lina Lindqvist reads her Letter from my childhood ”
“Childhood is a time when the world is rushing into us with the power of a runaway bull. The air forcing its way into the lungs, the impressions ambush sight and hearing, the body is filled by particles. Wide open minds will absorb what the world offers. The child who had been sleeping in weightlessness in nine months can wake up anywhere: in a condominium, in a shelter or on a garbage dump.”
“Little Nené growing up in Colombia in the 1920s, one of the few relatively peaceful periods in the country’s violent history. The new time arriving in the guise of a automobile that Nené is mistaken for the devil. The society is strictly patriarchal, everyone should know their place. The rich fine linen tablecloths embroidered by halvsvältande peasant girls are kept locked up in a convent.”
“Nené is the colombian artist Emma Reyes, in his time a friend of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, always in the center of the access rights, but at the same time in the margin of the main circuit. Letter from my childhood that are now published in English, is a literary sensation.”
“the Myth of a classic, which is buried in a box in the attic and then rise from the dead and strike the world with amazement, is, in this case a reality. Reyes wrote a letter about his childhood to a friend. They dealt with growing up at a garbage dump in the capital city of Bogotá, if standing move around in the countryside and of the monastery, where she arrived after being abandoned at a train station.”
“Reyes is a contemporary of his countryman, the nobel prize winner in literature Gabriel García Márquez, who in an interview said that ”my work is admired for the imagination but the truth is that there is not a single line in my books not based on reality”. Márquez drew the attention of the Reyes letter already in her life, but the master’s praise led only to Reyes cut off his writing in anger and remained silent for two decades. The letters were discovered after her death and in the preface describes the book’s English translator, Daniel Alarcón and the cruel and contradictory beautiful background to the book’s creation.”
“Reyes faithfully follows his inner child from the very first, remarkably early and detailed memories. She is loyal to the child, no guessing, and don’t fill in, they allow gaping holes to be. The woman she grows up in has an ambiguous relationship with her, it seems as if little Nené just been dumped by her and dragged then from one disaster to the other. The events are described succinctly and is macabre erratic.”
“On magic realism would be the embroidery would Letters from my childhood to be back, where the wires that run the length and breadth becomes a work of art in its own power. To cope with so much reality requires all the magic a child can muster. This is a fantastic book in every sense of the word.”
“” Letter from my childhood”
