the narrator of The great journey In Funchal, he runs into a stranger, a Spaniard named Oliver Griffin, who begins to tell him about his life without preamble. Starting from that New Year’s Day of this century, Griffin will be adding episodes of the “great trip” of his life in bars, cafes in the port, hotels or endless walks. Said anonymous narrator, authentic alter ego functional of Adolfo Garcia Ortega (Valladolid, 1958), a silent and attentive interlocutor, spellbound by the “rants” of the astonishing oral navigator and absorbed in that “verbal navigation” that entered and left his own life and that of others, serves as executor of the loquacious character and takes note of their stories, which feed the book we read.
Griffin’s story has a vague appearance, but it is structured around a central incident, an old boat trip bound for a mysterious place, Desolation Island, the character’s Ithaca, off the coast of the Strait of Magellan. The trip will emulate that of his grandparents decades ago, it will materialize his maniacal hobby of painting islands and it will revalidate his unavoidable obsession with invisibility, with being someone invisible.
The medullary travel story functions as narrative skeleton which, in addition to connecting with the journey of the ancestors from which a family story is derived, also connects with another remote journey, in times of Philip II, which takes us to imaginary historical chimeras. But all this is just a plot channel that is filled without pause or calm with more stories; from each anecdote another is born with which it is not related. Every time Griffin opens his mouth, and he doesn’t stop doing it, a new incident arises that he recounts with relish and detail.
This plot is configured as a game of russian dolls that incorporate a succulent gallery of contents and forms of fiction: episodes of adventures and piracy, the unusual, the overflowing imagination, the sentimental plot, the chronicle of horror and violence, the exotic or costumbrist note, the visionary, the historical fable , the metaliterary discourse… At the same time, through the mouth of the talkative Griffin, the matter of identity, the longing for spirituality, the dreaming of prosaic life, magic, theosophy, the suggestion of automata, the loving alienation, hermaphrodite perplexity…
Thus, The great journey It is an extensive narrative encyclopedia that pivots, on the other hand, on an overflowing literary enthusiasm. Explicit mentions of the popular literature of the 19th century, that of dumas, Conrad, Stevenson, melville, Conan Doyle either Verne, serve as generic support for the novel. Added to these are various cultural references, Petrarch, flaubert, baudelaire either Joyceto the filmmaker James Whaleto the painter Arcimboldo…, as well as a gallery of historical figures.
‘The Great Voyage’ is a game of Russian dolls that incorporates a succulent gallery of content: episodes of adventures and piracy, the unusual…
Such a cultural newscast and mosaic of incidents, indebted to the most genuine taste for telling stories and edited with absolute formal magistery, proposes an extensive reflection on human nature. Life is a journey with “forks” that seeks to fulfill a destiny. Longings or obsessions intervene in the journey: the temptation to be someone else, desires and dreams, the weight of chance… Living, it is said, means overcoming mistakes, failures, disappointments, injustices, pain, tears, to get where one wants.
At the service of such a proposal, García Ortega displays an astonishing fabulatory capacity. Such high merit does not prevent a couple of reservations. A, fatigue so much accumulation of stories. Another abuses a hyperculturalism that leads him to curl the loop: Griffin is staying at a “Hotel Aramis”, which was previously called “Dumas”.
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The adventures and piracy of Adolfo García Ortega, an amazing storyteller