Max Aub (1903–1972)

Crimenes ejemplares (Selected crimes) is a short collection of first-person utterances by perpetrators on their crimes, which are almost always murder. Unlike, say, Félix Fénéon's collage of newspaper items on crime (Novels in three lines), Aub's is fictional, but ultra-realistic, although with an absurdist shade. Oddly, while Fénéon's technique ends up bestowing a surreal quality to things that actually happened, Aub's invented crimes and the chorus of deadpan, apologetic, defiant, show more furious, indifferent, jeering, repentant, despairing, insane etc. voices have the immediacy and authenticity of a on-the-spot documentary.

The edition I have is set to resemble a newspaper's columns, two per page, one containing text and the adjacent newspaper cuttings and photos. Each perpetrator's remarks are given in single paragraphs and not otherwise marked or attributed, we understand the shift from one to another from the text and the type of voice. From the whole there arises a sense of hopeless bleakness about the violence of human nature and the fragility of our sanities and lives. Most crimes are murders and most have been committed on a trifle, whether for trifling motives ("I just had to have that ticket...") or an impulse of rage ("How many times have I begged him not to scrape the chair on the floor like that?! How many?!") Juxtaposed, they show that anything and its opposite may serve as a reason to destroy (one murderer's "I killed her because she had a stomachache." followed by another's "I killed her because I had a stomachache.") show less

Abandoned after 60 pages. Reads like someone in a manic state frenetically telling you in painstaking detail about something you have absolutely no familiarity with. Place names, people, events go quickly skipping by, leaving me unenlightened about anything. A glance ahead gives me no belief this changes, so, ah well.

Beware the translator's warning, I suppose: "The book has been a challenge for the translator and will be a challenge to the reader... Readers new to all this will be show more disorientated at times but I am certain it is one of those occasions when the steepness of the learning curve is more than justified by the results."

If you aren't really interested in the Spanish Civil War, I wouldn't bother trying. show less

De quantas formas se pode matar alguém? Muitas.
E Max Aub conta-nos algumas, por sinal bastante engraçadas. Menos para a vítima.

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