Kamchatka
Marcelo Figueras
Publicado: 2003 | 291 páginas
Novela Drama

Todos querríamos tener una armadura que nos proteja del dolor. Pero uno levanta una pared para protegerse de lo que viene de afuera y al final descubre que se ha quedado encerrado. Kamchatka es la última palabra que Harry escucha de labios de su padre. Aquel territorio fantástico e inaccesible, poblado de osos salvajes y con picos nevados envueltos en nubes de azufre, será el refugio donde ese chico de diez años se ocultará para curar sus heridas, para resistir. Para Harry, Kamchatka será su Avalón. De la mano de un niño obligado a contemplar el lado oscuro de la realidad, Marcelo Figueras nos lleva a recorrer el capítulo más aciago de nuestro pasado reciente. Este relato, poblado de personajes tiernos, cercanos y llenos de humor, es también una aventura: la de asomarse sobre el horizonte y descubrir que ninguna historia desaparece, simplemente cambia de género.

One of the best books I have read this year. The reality of this time in Argentina's recent history is always in your awareness, lurking and chilling, but the memory blurs this even more than the child's perspective. It's terribly sad, you know even before opening the cover what is coming and yet it isn't so pervasive that the rest of the story is overshadowed. Children are brilliant and resiliant, always shaped by the adult world but somehow finding themselves in spite of dirty wars and horrible human acts. Beautiful writing, funny, tender, detailed, tragic, mundane and yet charged. Read it! ( )

This story of a 10 year old boy forced into hiding with his parents and younger brother during the “Dirty War” in Argentina is told in two voices - the young “Harry” and the older one recounting his story. The story is told in short episodes and much of the context of the story is ambiguous, just as it probably would have been to a young boy. He’s pulled out of school, given a new name, and moved out of the city in which he has grown up - all major upheavals which we follow him trying to make sense of, trying to assert order in a chaotic, uncertain world. What I loved most about this novel was how Figueras portrays “Harry” and his family - it’s a beautiful portrait of one’s relationships with parents and siblings, at times loving and warm and at others frustrating and incomprehensible. But it feels very real, and despite everything that they are going through, one feels how lucky they are. ( )

As I read I kept thinking: "Is this author primarily a screenwriter?" until I finally looked the author up online and discovered Figueras did indeed write this novel first as a screenplay.

So here is what is wrong with a novel that is first conceived as a screenplay. There will be no clear sense of an inner narrative voice driving the story. The details will be scanty. There will be no depth in the writing and every scene will feel a little bit shortchanged, word-wise--because after all the film is already there in the writer's head. Screenplay writers are used to working in conditions where the scantness of words will be made up for by moving images of film so the chapters in a screenwriter's novel will trend toward scenic shorthand.

In the chapters where Figueras breaks out if this limited and flat screenwriter's voice--chapter 33 stands out--to write from a more novelistic point of view, the writing is moving. But for the most part the book Kamchatka is one of the rare times where I get the feeling the movie must be better. ( )

Terrific contemplation of time, memory and loss. ( )