Bernardo Munuera brings together more than fifty glosses originally published on Zenda. They are not standard reviews, but marginal annotations, cultivated digressions, and personal reflections on works by Ottessa Moshfegh, H. P. Lovecraft, Hernán Díaz, Natalia Ginzburg, Jon Fosse, Pedro Mairal, Flannery O’Connor, Manuel Chaves Nogales, Bernardo Atxaga, Evelio Rosero, and many others.
In Zenda we reproduce the Prologue that Lorenzo Bernier has written for From a Cell in Zenda, by Bernardo Munuera.
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PROLOGUE
Lorenzo Bernier
There are books that are written in the silence of a room and there are books written from a cell. Not a jail cell, but that other one, more generous and more demanding, which the reader builds for himself when he decides to pause before a volume, underline it, discuss it, love it or reject it with the same intensity with which one discusses a friend. Bernardo Munuera Montero has written this book from that cell. A Zenda cell, yes, but also a reading cell: the intimate space where other people’s pages become living matter and where the review ceases to be a mere editorial courtesy and becomes a form of thought.
From a Cell in Zenda: Glosses on Books is not a collection of conventional reviews. Those who search here for plot summaries, numerical notes, or the quick verdict of consumer criticism will be at the wrong door. What they will find instead is a florilegium of glosses: marginal notes, digressions, free associations, quotes that intersect with other quotes, personal memories that cross with the plot of a novel or the argument of an essay. Munuera Montero does not limit himself to saying whether a book is good or bad. He prefers to ask what that book does to the reader who holds it in their hands, what echoes it awakens, what wounds it reopens, what endless conversations it provokes. And he does so with a prose that does not fear excess, irony, digression, or the risk of seeming too personal.
There is, in these pages, a declared taste for literature as a form of life. Not as escapism, but as a way of inhabiting the world. Therefore the glosses glide naturally from Ottessa Moshfegh to Herbert Clyde Lewis, from Natalia Ginzburg to Jon Fosse, from Pedro Mairal to Flannery O’Connor, from Manuel Chaves Nogales to Evelio Rosero. There is no criterion of fashion or forced topicality. There is, rather, fidelity to a voracious curiosity and to an ethical demand: not letting a book pass without attempting, at least, to understand what truth — or which fertile lie — it carried hidden.
The author moves with ease between genres and eras. He can speak about an Argentine dystopia with the same passion with which he pauses at Lovecraft’s notebook of ideas or at Manuel Moyano’s diary. He can defend the necessity of reading the classics without pedantry and, at the same time, point out the cracks in certain contemporary literature that confuses noise with voice. There is in his gaze a blend of generosity and severity. Generosity because he never approaches a book with the intention of destroying it; severity because he will not forgive mediocrity dressed up as originality or the imposture sold as authenticity.
One of the greatest strengths of this volume is that it does not pretend to be exhaustive or systematic. There is no complete map of current literature or a mandatory reading program. Instead, there is a personal, almost diary-like tour through the books that have occupied the author’s desk—or bedside table—for a certain period. And that fragmentary nature, of loose gloss, of marginal note, is precisely what gives it its power. Each text can be read independently, but together they form a portrait of the reader who writes them: someone who believes literature remains a serious matter, even when it wears humor or lightness.
There is also, and this is not minor, a constant reflection on the craft of writing about books. Munuera Montero asks again and again what sense a review has in a time of instant opinions and algorithms that recommend without reading. His answer, implied in every page, is clear: it makes sense when the review becomes a form of knowledge, when the critic does not merely judge but dares to think aloud, when the text about a book becomes, in turn, literature. Hence these glosses are full of digressions that, rather than being superfluous, constitute the true heart of the volume. A reference to Barthelme can lead to a meditation on parody; an anecdote about Ginzburg can open a reflection on the condition of the woman writer; a detail from Chaves Nogales can help to nuance historical prejudices that we still bear.
The attentive reader will also discover a number of recurring obsessions: the relationship between reality and fiction, the power of memory, the dignity of secondary characters, the need for concrete prose over vague abstraction, the value of digression as a mode of thinking. There is also an implicit defense of a certain slowness. In a world that demands quick opinions, Munuera Montero allows himself to pause, quote at length, associate freely, even contradict himself if the reading requires it. That slowness is not laziness: it is respect.
Humor is, of course, not missing. Humor that is sometimes caustic, sometimes tender, always literary. The author does not take himself too seriously, but he does take books seriously. And that combination is perhaps the hardest to achieve. There are pages in which he laughs at certain quirks of contemporary criticism, at authors’ vanity, at editorial fashions, without slipping into easy cynicism. There are others in which he is genuinely moved, and does not veil his emotion.
This book arises from the author’s relationship with Zenda, that space which has managed to keep literary conversation alive in a time of distractions. And here it is only fair to pause a moment to thank Álvaro Colomer. It was he who opened Zenda’s door to Bernardo Munuera Montero and offered him, with generosity and discernment, the place where these glosses could take shape, page by page, reading by reading. Without that initial trust, without that possibility to write with freedom and continuity in a magazine that continues to believe in literature as dialogue, this volume probably would not have existed. The gratitude is not mere courtesy: it is a real debt.
The glosses gathered here have the coherence of a single voice, not the outline of an editorial plan. When you close the volume, you will not feel you have witnessed a catalog of new publications. Instead, you will feel you have accompanied someone in a long and fruitful dialogue with books. A dialogue that does not end when you turn the last page, because the best review — and these are so — is the one that does not exhaust the book it speaks about, but opens it even further.
Bernardo Munuera Montero has written from his cell. We, upon reading him, enter it for a moment. And we discover that it is not a place of confinement, but a place of freedom: the freedom of someone who knows that literature, when taken seriously, remains one of the highest forms of conversation we have left.
May these glosses find their readers. And may those readers, in turn, find in them not only opinions, but companionship.
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Author: Bernardo Munuera. Title: From a Cell in Zenda. Availability: Amazon.