Gardens speed is easily the most famous storybook of the non-famous storybooks. Essential reading that nobody known. Except Alberto Olmos and four more. A win-win manual.
Review of Gardens speed
The white hole in the adjoining page portends a near end. There are still a handful of lines left to consume; still, the hope that this tale has some end. But no. The story has long since ended. Like the previous one, like the next one. Eloy Tizón's stories die without warning. Or also: the stories of Eloy Tizón never end, because this goes beyond going through the hidden mystery between A and B. Like poetry, like painting, this is about contemplating leaves turned into canvases of words. Slow reading, constant reflection, permanent deposit and proof of posterity.
“It was a kind of hecatomb. Half the class fell in love with Olivia Reyes, all at once or in turns, when she came in each morning tidied up, barely powdered, she was a crisp, vulnerable vision that would hurt you if you even thought about it in the middle of the night."
Why call it childhood when you can say gardens? The above excerpt is taken from Gardens speed, the tale of childhood and melancholy that gives its name to this great compilation by Eloy Tizón and also the text that, in the opinion of Alberto Olmos, “it will always be the best story by Tizón (an author whom Mal-wounded Olmos once called the “best Spanish short story writer of all time”).
“For Christ's sake, someone tell me where the high clear days are going, my light childhood, my carefree youth. It was so easy to be small and bring notes. Little Austin with his little red pencil. Is there somewhere a kind of waste deposit where someone happily stores our happy moments? If so, I would call that place God.”
This piece could belong to the same story, but no. Surely you are already getting an idea of the predominant aroma of Gardens speed. The excerpt is taken from a story that eats you up (seriously, it rips your guts out) where a man leaves the city to spend New Year's Eve inside the car in a vacant lot. Like in intermittent life (“If I am happier I disintegrate”), as in Villa Borghese (“This is the story of a man who fell in love and his shoes grew”), the stamp that is repeated the most is that of the closed party; the banquet with cobwebs.
The atmospheric and millimetric prose of Gardens speed
Gardens speed It is a sad and evocative book, where each scene draws a withered existence, gray and entangled in the memory of an extinct happiness. A present kidnapped by the shadows of a better past that will never return.
To compensate for the triumphalism (everything said so far in the review is intended to be positive) and add some crumbs to it: at times it is a book that is too... atmospheric, and you have to put your heart into it.
Furthermore, although Blight ensures who doesn't write for writers (which could be true), Gardens speed start with Letter to Nabokov and, the truth, it is undeniable that this story loses too much juice for those who do not know, to give two examples, that Sirin was the pseudonym with which the Russian signed in Berlin or that Ardis Hall is the country house where Ada and Van soaked their ardor:
“You who saw the sunset of a century reflected in the bell of your bicycle. Sirin, what a strange passenger. Among the larch trees in the garden there is an empty place, an urn of light where no harm is possible and I imagine you. Your magic lantern, Ada's library, the fiery transparency of Ardis Hall, belie that there is death."
But well, also many people (me) ignore (was) what a larch is and not for that reason the planet stopped spinning. Gardens speed there are 142 pages of millimetric prose and chiselled style down to the minimum expression where, however, the machinery accepts the removal of many links. The stories have too many pieces not because they intend to lengthen the arrival at the goal, but because the path is the goal. It's about enjoying the ride; of the speed of the gardens.
PD: Larch (Larix decidua): Tree of the Pinaceae family native to Europe. It reaches about 45 m in height and can live for around 600 years. Unlike most conifers, it loses its foliage during the winter.
Eloy Blight, Outfield Speed
Anagram, Barcelona 1992
142 pages | 7 euros