WE241 || What connects a book to me ...

Everything has been said about the importance of the book and reading, I have nothing to add, Galen, but I want to insist on the importance of discernment and the selection of the book one wants to read.

Over time I have learned to read everything, but very few books and authors become part of that personal and intimate library that "connects" us.

Thus reading goes from obligation to necessity, to pleasure, and becomes a permanent companion of our existence.

At the moment, I am reading the novel "Snow in Autumn", it is a small masterpiece that deals with the Karin family and their escape to France fleeing the revolution and the war, the fate of each of its members and the nanny of three generations.

The tone of the novel is melancholic and tragic, an inevitable nostalgia for home, the land and the homeland forced to leave.

There is a feeling of rupture and anguish, something similar to what almost eight million Venezuelans are experiencing in the flesh today, Galen.😢

The nostalgia of exile and forced emigration is very far from the romantic feeling of home and the distant homeland.

It is the Portuguese and Galician homesickness and saudade but with an additional drama, in the novel, of a truncated destiny, severed in a violent way and a non-existent future. Fleeing communism has meant continuous generations since the Russian revolution at the beginning of the last century. In my country it is a painful experience that uprooting repeats.

This novel speaks of emptiness, the existence emptied of time and space. To be in a place that doesn't belong to me in any sense. It is the absolute anonymity, the being not being, they neither care about me, nor does it matter to me. Until the definitive silence remembering that in Paris there is no snow in Autumn, as if there was, in his ancestral land.

I read this book, in a special place in my house and it makes me think about the eternal return. A timely reminder that I am still here, in my country, in my city, always hopeful, in a better future for our children, grandchildren and country.

Janitze.🌹