Since ancient times, the bards have sung of love, war, loneliness, melancholy or oblivion, and the Homeric poems are no exception. Rescuing that tradition, in this volume of stories we find Hera’s jealousy, Achilles’ anger, the pain of the Trojans, Hector’s death, Hermes’ travels or Penelope’s wait. The myths are here retold in with delicate brilliance and imagination, adapted to the present time, they describe characters that could traverse any of our modern cities. The classic myths are therefore the common threads of a book that, as its own author indicates, tries to transmit “the pains, the betrayals, the hatreds, the passions and the joys that are told in the Iliad, in the Odyssey or in the old legends about gods and heroes”.

“Irene Reyes-Noguerol has been able to grant these creatures an intimate, heroic, divine epic. I don’t know what literary life is, but I do know what living literature consists of. Irene also knows it, because she is already one more member of the club together with Homero, Cernuda, Borges.” Fernando Iwasaki

SELECTED BY GRANTA AS ONE OF THE BEST SPANISH LANGUAGE WRITERS UNDER 35 – April 2021

 

172 pages – Original language: Spanish/Spain (Maclein & Parker, 2018)