Well, music, opera, zarzuela and, in general, the lyrics and songs of this genre -the romantic one- are valued and sometimes overvalued, while romantic literature is frankly undervalued in the cultural world.
Romantic literature is seen as a genre, sometimes, of low intellectuality and segmentary, only for women – although the author we are reviewing today has endearing readers and for the most part over 70, of those who know what life is for. And that continues to happen even with authors whose books are of great literary quality, of great historical value if you will, and of great human depth… like those of the Argentine writer Florencia Bonelli (Córdoba, 1971).
Talking to her is immersing yourself in an unpredictable universe of fiction, travel, history, tarotism and spirituality, music – from lyrical singing to rock – in short, immersing yourself in pure life.
Born under the sign of Taurus, Florencia, known as “Flore” to her friends, felt that she never fit into the model that had been predestined for her: born to a Catholic family of Irish descent, she studied economics and practiced until fate stopped her. forehead in the form of a book and showed him his way. She is a consistent woman, to the point that she only recently started using a very basic cell phone to not encourage human exploitation in those territories where Coltan is produced in the African Congo, the scene of one of her trilogies, “Path of Fire ”.
Despite being a compulsive and omnivorous reader for as long as she can remember – Charlotte Brönte’s book “Jane Eyre” comes to mind in our conversation, she continued in her accounting practice until, in the library of her mother-in-law’s house, she found and he devoured “The Arab”, by Edith Maite Hall, a book that simply changed his life, literally, from one day to the next. And she changed the numbers for the scenes that came to her head and that little by little she was translating into letters.
He tells us that the most important things in life have come to him through books. I ask him about some that have been key in the construction of his and the genre to which he is dedicated, and he names me some as majestic as “Love under the white thorn”, by Ai Mi, a beautiful and moving story of a love in full Chinese revolution, made into a film by the prestigious director Zhang Yimou and continues with “The Bronze Horseman”, a narrative poem whose context is the flood that devastated St. Petersburg in 1824, and whose name comes from the statue of Peter the Great , founder of the city, and symbol of its splendor and flourishing; in it he narrates the story of Eugenio, a poor official who loses his girlfriend in the catastrophe, goes mad with pain, and one night of despair, he apostrophizes the statue of the tsar that rises in the square that today belongs to the Decembrists, to the banks of the Neva.
They are love stories in the midst of situations of great human conflict or historical events. And this has inspired the work of Florence in a vital way.
The work that we are reviewing today is entitled “Hechizo del agua”, and has a beautiful aquamarine blue cover with astrological symbols that, from the outset, invites you to open its pages. It is the love story between Brenda and Diego, a Piscean and a Virginian, she is a kind of alter ego of the writer – she recounts her entire transition from accounting sciences to her artistic destiny – he is an addicted, dominant and passionate musician, whose family has done great harm to Brenda’s. She has been in love with him since her childhood, but he hardly recognizes her as a sister to her. Music as a trigger for a convoluted love. Loss as a trigger for a tragedy. A chance meeting on a plane as the trigger for the chronicle of this story of love and pain.
The poetic transversality of predictive and descriptive astrology, through the work is one of its great riches. The characters were built based on her birth chart with the help of a renowned astrologer, a great friend of Florencia. Both the author and the astrologer constructed the characters and their chronology, as if they really existed.
For Florence, astrology is an empirical science that, more than to predict, should be used for self-knowledge. And he understood it that way from the first day he read
If the moon, a small star that gravitates around the earth, has a considerable influence on the tides, how much influence will the stars have had at the time of our birth or in the present. It is what has been called humanist or psychological astrology, which reminds me deeply of the father of the Colombian writer Ricardo Silva, a rational physicist whose life tool was the tarot and whose influence reaches Ricardo’s magnificent work. He tells us that, unfortunately, more than automated, there are many charlatans out there and that astrology is “bastardized”. It is clear to me, then, that Bonelli’s work, through fiction, tries precisely to recover and bring these generations closer to this reflective science.
My favorite character definitely can’t help but be Cecilia, Brenda’s aunt: she is balance and wisdom, like my aunt Clara. She is, according to what the author of her tells me, “an old soul”, one of those who leads Brenda by the hand of life. And that’s what the novel has, that the multiple characters can lead us to easily identify ourselves and for that reason the story is engaging, passionate.
“Water Spell” is the latest novel in the “Born” tetralogy, a series about four women born under the signs of Taurus, Aquarius, Aries and Pisces; the first of which she wrote when she began her dalliances with astrology. And the last one he finished writing – after a year of judicious research and writing – for a year.
The music – from the lyrical song that Brenda sings to the rock of Diego’s band – is vital in the novel, as much as it is for the writer, who writes her books listening to instrumental music. In fact, at the end she brings the complete list of songs that illuminate certain decisive episodes and that I recommend listening to while reading the book to achieve a memorable experience. Music in all languages and of all rhythms. What is omnivorous about the author is not only her reading, but also that she reaches her novelized music.
Each character tells his soul and his story in a fluid and delicate way, in the third person, in the context of a Buenos Aires – and a distant Spain – more or less contemporary, and its verisimilitude is such that it is inevitable, even from the first pages, search for its real existence, or unreal, on the Internet… And yet, realizing that many are not real, Bonell’s fiction has such magic that one continues “Googling” until the end of the book.
This work has reconciled me with the romantic novel genre. Knowing that there is a writer who writes impeccably, with human and intellectual depth, who mixes diverse arts and sciences in her writing, without moral or educational spirit, but for the simple fact of entertaining, is to return to the roots of literature.
*The opinions expressed in this text are the sole responsibility of the author and do not represent the editorial position of Pulzo at all.