Simpatia by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón

´Los abandonar para annunciar que se marchan de este infierno´.

I am more than content to be able to follow the language promises I made myself at the beginning of this year. Out of which, improving my Spanish went perfectly well, with few hours the week dedicated to practice and improve the language. Thus, my easiness to read books in Spanish, that happens to coincide with my specific interest in topics and cultures using it as the main mean of communication.

Simpatia by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón is my second book I´ve fully read in Spanish. It is also my first book by an author from Venezuela. I have good friends from Venezuela, who had to leave due to the everyday pressures of dictatorship. One does not need to be politically active to decide that a country is not for you. It is enough to want to have a normal and decent life to realize that political power is disregarding its citizens, is stealing their lives for them, for the sake of the self-enrichment of a crony government, intensively helped to survive by other dictatorship of disgusting memory. What future such countries may offer to their citizen?

The reality of Venezuela is displayed in Simpatia by the dogs left behind after people left the country. They are abandoned as one abandons dear memories that cannot be taken over: the childhood house, the friends, the family. 

Ulises Kan is happy to hear that his wife, Paulina, left the country, and him too. Out of nowhere, he is assigned a mission that may help him keep the house he shared with his now ex-wife: creating a society that may take care of the strayed dogs, the patriotic dogs who are not leaving the Chavismo behind because they have nowhere to go. Thus, he got entangled with tragi-comical political encounters, and envious generals - as always in dictatorships, you cannot escape those random state interests no matter how much you want to stay out of it.

But the books is not about the dictatorship and does not have any surreptitious message, in the vein of many books written in the communist countries during the Cold War. Simpatia is first and foremost a book about everyday people and their lives, about how they live and why they leave and what they left behind. It is a simplicity hard to achieve while writing such books because it means one may left behind the grundge and frustration that definitely a dictatorship built. People who survived everyday dictatorships may see life with more cruel eyes.

Another advantage of such a non-ideologically focused stance is that the plot itself follows its own pattern, with twists that do follow the internal laws of the narrative, and not the already set premises, just because some arguments should be done.

Longlisted for 2024 International Booker Prize, Simpatia was one of my favorite books from the Booker´s list in a long time. I have already The Night by Calderón and cannot wait to start reading it in the next weeks.

From the point of view of the language, the level of difficulty is middle to complicated. The Spanish spoken in Venezuela may have its own particularities both in terms of vocabulary - marramucias, trickery, is my newest vocabulary addition - and sentence structure. I do have more Spanish books on my TBR and once finishing the book, with the help of a dictionary, and reading a sentence more than twice sometimes, I feel encouraged to continue my language journey.#

Rating: 5 stars