Marvin Menjívar - Profesor, escritor

"Ahora ya no peleo por coraje... ya entiendo más las razones para pelear... Hasta me duele cuando mato a un soldadito... Pues sí, son campesinos pobres como yo" Una novela narrada desde la perspectiva de una mujer luchadora al lado de la guerrilla durante la guerra civil de El Salvador nos muestra una visión del conflicto armado en nuestro país, una cicatriz que se mantiene a pesar del paso de los años. El autor demuestra que el hecho de tener como protagonista a un integrante de la guerrilla, no es determinante para mostrar una visión subjetiva o sesgada. TRAMA Zenaida es el alias que utiliza la protagonista de la novela, una joven que solía estudiar medicina en la Universidad de El Salvador, que vivía con su madre que vendía en el mercado, que tenía un noviazgo placentero con Sabino Loucel. Todo se ha acabado con el recrudecimiento del conflicto armado en El Salvador, solo quedan los recuerdos de un pasado feliz. En el presente, Zenaida es una combatiente del lado...

"This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramplike pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either" PLOT The novel follows the lives of three women with lives that are apparently unrelated to one another (beside the fact that they live in the same country, Australia). Cecilia Fitzpatrick is a succesful and perfectionist woman with a perfect marriage. She is married to John Paul and has three daughters. She wishes for something shocking to happen, and it definitely does happen. One day, she finds a letter that her husband wrote in the event of his death. She struggles on whether to read the letter or not. Tess O'Leary discovers her cousin, Felicity, is having an affair with her husband. While she decides what to do, she decides to go to her mother's house to take care of her and reflect on whether to di...

"Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur." Mystery, suspense and  a lot of drama can be perceived on the surface of Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride. Interpretting this novel is a slippery matter. From afar, the book is a work of art; if you look closely to the story, you will find a group of women that have suffered in the hands of another woman: Zenia. But even that...

"You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery." Stone Mattress is another triumph from master storyteller Margaret Atwood, author of the critically acclaimed novels The Robber Bride, Cat's Eye and The Blind Assassin . She demostrates that she is not only able to create complex universes and compelling stories with a complex structure, but she is capable of synthetising a story still providing a gripping literary experience. PLOT Stone Mattress is a collection of nine short stories. I was fascinated by every tale which contains Margaret's usual sharpness and mastery of language. T...

"Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized" Most novels that talk about childhood describe this phase as one full of joy, happiness and games. Cat's Eye is a brilliant exception. It's a refreshing vision of a somber childhood full of bitterness that determines a future. This novel makes us reflect on the phrase The past is in the past . It's not. The past always leaves a mark, a scar; it shapes us. PLOT After years of absence, Elaine Risley, brilliant painter, comes back to her hometown, Toronto. She's in town to present some of her paintings, her first exhibit to the public. Elaine is anxious, not for the importance of the show, but for the phantoms of the past that harass her. Through flashbacks, we get to know Elaine in her childhood. She's the daughter of an enthomologist and a housewife, she has a brother that is interested in science, Stephen. They live far from the city. Elaine...