El hombre que inventó Manhattan

I finally finished Ray Loriga's "El hombre que inventó Manhattan"
and let me just say that I loved every word of it. I still stand by what I said in my earlier post, on my first impressions of the book. This is a colorful and deliciously sordid tapestry of stories that combine to give life to a city that is at once famously elusive and enticing. Beyond its' relation to the City of New York, specifically the borough of Manhattan, I find that the entire book transcends its' title and this territory in that in general and concise words it paints for the reader the diversity found in human nature especially bred in a large mass of population coexisting in a tight space. We are all related and connected, man and nature. This was most evident when I found the chapter on the rat Missy, describing it's first adventure into central park, being a young rat. Which connects to the ending entitled, "De Ratones y Hombres", where this same rat is killed by the narrator, before his sons' eyes whom had just named it Missy.  Curiously enough, this immediately brought to mind lines by the scottish poet of the Romantic period in English literature Robert Burns, "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!" (Lines 39-42). This is from his poem "To a Mouse". There is an interesting correlation between these two different works that I find relevant and important in understanding the core of what Ray Loriga presents in this book. Besides a description of the human condition found in a city as diverse and populated as NYC it is also a testament of man at his most grotesque and real and the harsh reality of human nature.

Now, I have begun and am about 15 pages in in the philosophical book I said in my previous post I was to begin next, Théorie du Corps Amoureux: Pour une érotique solaire by Michel Onfray. So far, I love what the book proposes to discuss and analyze in the opening pages. Briefly and roughly, it proposes individual autonomy and freedom from the bounds of oppressive western cultural traditions retaking and reinstating the Greek philosophers.

Till next post...

El Hombre Que Inventó Manhattan by Ray Loriga

Taking a breather from philosophy, I purchased "El Hombre Que Inventó Manhattan" by Ray Loriga. From what I've gathered he is a novelist, scriptwriter and movie director from Spain. I was completely unfamiliar with him and his work but I purchased it anyway, I enjoy taking risks with unfamiliar writers. So far, it's been amazing. It's a collection of short stories that at first seem independent of each other but as one progresses with one after the other each piece of the puzzle begins to fall into place with the next and so on. It is obvious that they are all interconnected. Which leads me to the hypothesis that that is the writer's intentions in this collection of stories which have as the center the City of New York. He weaves the stories, full of a wide diversity of characters, all interconnected by the fact that in totality they form the tapestry that is said city. There are elements of the morbid, the sick, a bit of perversion, sex, lies, yet there is a string of the enchanting in it all. As of today, I am in the sixth story, stopped in my tracks by a pair of wonderful sentences that commence the story, which is called "Peces Voladores", that left me pensive. With that I conclude this post.

"Para Andreas, lo más parecido a la felicidad era el ritmo constante de las obligaciones ineludibles que le sujetaban al momento presente como los alfileres sujetan las mariposas enmarcadas. Sin embargo, por mucho que uno lo deteste, a veces no queda más remedio que pensar en las cosas que uno no quiere pensar, especialmente en los días de lluvia."

Finishing this book, I am going to pick up another recent purchase written by this fellow right here. Yikes!


Happy reading.