Lana Corujo stepped into the novel last year without knowing that Han cantado bingo would become a title known to everyone, without imagining that her characters would move so many readers and, perhaps—as many authors hope—that her novel would live a thousand lives thanks to word-of-mouth.
The novel takes us to Lanzarote, and its writing carries the force of a sleeping volcano—the kind that invites you to confide in it until you forget that one day it might wake up, and if it does, it will unleash devastation: the same force that this story bears. To achieve this, the writing is broken into chapters marked by numbers, like a bingo card, except here they correspond to the ages of the speaker. And thus we are immersed in the lives of two sisters, told from within a wounded family.
If I had to explain what it’s about, I would prefer not to, to leave readers unscathed by the reading.
But if even so I had to say something, I would speak of The Hangman, that game two sisters share in the time it takes for their Grandmother to return from bingo. These girls, who live gazing at the volcano, share their soul in every word in a way only the reader understands, since she has lost the innocence of those who speak and is capable of seeing everything differently. Only one speaks, but the other, Aleja, is the one who appears most in the novel. As much as a younger sister would be to the elder.
Because Han cantado bingo is about sisters, that bond not so explored in literature and understood only by those who have it.
In that family there are also some parents, with whom we will be far less generous than their daughters are, and there is a secret, I hesitate to call it a gift, that passes from generation to generation and about which we will be gradually drawn in. Corujo fragments the story, and leaves us with a drawing that holds the keys to the entire novel. Sometimes, a simple line is the boundary that separates how children and adults view the world, that separates reality from imagination and symbolizes mystery and loss. Sometimes a line is everything, and in this novel it is the silhouette of a volcano, and its name is El Ahorcado.
Lana Corujo has written a hard-hitting novel, in which the tenderness of words is a weapon hurled at the reader. A story that grows slowly and whose shadow accompanies after finishing it.
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Author: Lana Corujo. Title: Han cantado bingo. Publisher: Reservoir Books. Sales: Todos tus libros.