captivate the reader for more than 200 pages through a history of hair, that's enough to leave most dubious aesthetic hairdressers? What cause its share of gray hairs for publishers who have the courage to publish the story in question. Yet Alan Pauls here comes the tour de force not only passionate, but also bring a deep reflection the links between our hair and our existence. is natural that the novel begins in a hair salon, while a translator (which could be Alan Pauls) unaccustomed to frequent such places, is found in the hands of a young woman was kneading the scalp. A time for relaxing effect, abandoned to other dimensions of his memory.
"What it does not exactly get a haircut. He sat in the chair from one machine to travel back in time (...)"
Since the hair seems to be forgotten, the appointment in ritual Celso, hairdresser Paraguay, including a little-known chapter of history we will be narrated in the end, reminds the slave to his punishment monthly. The awkward position, orders hammered with diabolical precision, and especially the usual questions, responding to a necessarily subjective embarrassment following which the man was forced against his will to express their will as concretely as possible, oppress at the highest point. Thus, the ideas he is secular, the "short" or "long", the "gradient" or the "homogeneity", shades of "little", the "somewhat" or "very" they resonate in the same way to the ears of a seasoned professional.
scenes that are sure to evoke some memories in the reader aware of the authenticity of the refund.
Associates to its fate, for better or for worse, his hair seem to be the guarantors of his personal history. They recur to him mean that they remain suspended over his head like a sword of Damocles, since no other part of the human body is capable, in the same way that our hair, make us aware of our perishable nature.
The willingness to change its cutting obeys somehow necessary transmute the witness of his conviction to come, a symbol of belonging to a tendency to assert itself in an era of loud and clear identity.
Thus, by stealing the image of this army of fingers led by his former girlfriend with red moccasins, probing the complexities of the African Cup of his classmates, he feels the caress of ideals that he decided to embrace on the spot, borrowing the style of the boy. A fiasco that will leave marks in his mind throughout his life. And option years, despite the setbacks of adulthood, invariably, Monti will be associated with this exuberance, hair and his seductive power.
"In some cases, these scars: one was hit, it fell and was bleeding, it was sewn, and the trace in the form of seven or right or the small energetic horseshoe clearer that appear when shaves his head are souvenirs * preventing the facts vanish in the haze of the past. But in most cases there was nothing, neither accident nor contusion or suture, nothing, and the marks are there, as clear as tattoos and fingerprints, birth lines, drawn on the ground close to the skin, reappear one day and are faith identity with any other region of the body or memory does not trace. "
However, at each meeting, more recognizable than ever, Monti carries the scars of the teeth-in-leg and other blows of fate dealt by fate, which, in turn, removes it from childhood.
Along the lines of the hand carry with them the future of each hair seems to reflect the trials endured by being that door. More than anywhere else parcel of our flesh or bones, hair relics remain, surviving the disappearance of the beloved, and take over a time invaluable, as evidenced by the auction of the lock of Che, treasure scattered among other treasures, or the final episode which I will not reveal details.
Alan Pauls impressed by the breadth of his sentences, in which flows simultaneously a multitude of ideas. Tourbillon syntactic uninterrupted from beginning to end, the core of which the reader might get lost if he does not get carried away by the spirit of the author, at times reflective and funny.
- Read haircut: History hair, Alain Pauls, translated from English by Serge Mestre newly available at Christian Bourgois .
- Reading notified of Frederick Fiolof
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