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To talk about the most recent thing, I will talk about the oldest thing. The most recent thing is the novel. The Angel and His Shadow (Seix Barral, 2024), published by Pablo Escandón, a writer with two short story collections and another novel to his credit. Beyond the Colossusa pioneering researcher in the field of digital communications and hypermedia at the Andina Simon Bolivar University. The oldest takes us back to the first century AD, to a remote part of the Mediterranean, when Nino’s novel The historical characters of Nino and Semiramis, considered one of the earliest Greek novels, barely survive on papyrus. Remnants, fragments, small records of an incomplete history. The chances of survival of such an ancient text are also affected. SatyriconA much longer novel by Petronio, consisting of only three books or chapters – the fifteenth, sixteenth and part of one – is enough for the story to survive with us today, or to have inspired Fellini’s film of the same name.
What is between the old and the new? The novel is a genre open to exploration and experimentation. There are probably many parallels between the reality of ancient manuscript fragments that have survived to this day, and the novels that can be written in our current world where manuscripts are less powerful than all the possibilities of digital platforms and the internet.
The Angel and His Shadow This is the story of multiple searches. First, a mysterious first-person narrator learns of the existence of one character, Giovanni Tapia, the Italian son of an Ecuadorian immigrant, who returns to Ecuador in search of another character, a young Jesuit named Benigno Moya. He will not travel to Europe, as King Charles III of Spain has ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. Moya will keep a diary in which he notes that his mission is to stay and report what is happening in the colonies. This in turn will arouse the suspicion of the Spanish authorities, who in turn appoint a spy for Moya, Abelardo Amancha. This conspiracy of search and persecution spreads into the 21st century at the hands of Tapia and the anonymous narrator, with the addition of a character, Callimaco Lucero, a real intellectual leader of the provinces, who first puts all possible help at Tapia’s disposal. Investigate the whereabouts of Moya’s diary in the wasteland of El Angel. This three-level journey – Moya’s, Tapia’s and that of the anonymous narrator who follows what happens in the media – is the purpose of a novel that, based on fragments and different narrative procedures, allows us to discover in depth the meaning of humor and irony applied to the characters in search of a transcendence that they cannot reach.
Of course, a novel is always more than the story it tells, even if its procedures seem invisible in the frantic advance of the plot. But they are always there. Or rather: there is no novel without procedures. Here it is The Angel and His Shadow This becomes striking if we consider the ease with which the author works on new technologies and digital platforms, in addition to the fact that no images or web links appear in this novel. Yet, despite its strict adherence to language, it is a novel deeply rooted in transmedia technologies. This is because the versatility and speed with which registers in the novel change across platforms becomes a transition from one way of writing to another, or more precisely, a change of form. The Angel and His Shadow It has a narrator who opens the novel, but then includes personal diary entries—Tapía’s and Moya’s—, long conversations in voice-over or chat format, television reports, articles about Moya, scholarly articles, transcripts, poems, hallucinatory testimonies, and adaptations of real authors such as Ramón Viescas or José Rumazo. This series of interruptions in writing is almost a Switch This turns the novel into the sum of perfectly woven fragments. This novel makes us understand why the ancient and fragmentary novel has been able to reach our time.
Or rather: what is it in the novel’s formal versatility that brings it closer to the plasticity of digital formats? When you think about this, you can look back and rethink the tradition of the novel, which is more rebellious and flexible than one would expect from the genre. It is for this reason that one rediscovers from time to time that in the context of the novel it is necessary to refer not only to the conventions of the classic realist novel, but also to the true pioneers, such as Tristram Shandy Stern’s digression, or Jacques the FatalistDiderot’s “Irreverence Against Realism” is even a huge work written in letters, just like ” Clarissa By Richardson Dangerous friendship Author: Choderlos de Laclos, no novel left containing the following story Golden Donkey Apuleius’s Story or Sum of Stories The DecameronAll narrative forms paved the way for the technological innovations of the 20th and 21st centuries. The dialogue between eras and forms, with a hopeful sense of humor, forms Pablo Escandon’s concern in this novel, which is agile and pleasant to read, and incidentally satirical portrayal of a country obsessed with understanding itself. (profound)
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