Audiobook3 hours
Las antipodas y el siglo (The Antipodes and the Century)
Written by Ignacio Padilla
Narrated by Fernando Flores
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
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About this audiobook
Aventureros a disgusto, soldados amnesicos, geografos locos y exiliados de si mismos ... Hombres, minimos, todos ellos, pero capaces de vislumbrar lo inalcanzable. Estos son los personajes que transitan por Las antipodas y el siglo, en las doce piezas maestras que componen el ultimo libro de Ignacio Padilla. Seres insolitos, trayectos indemostrables y descubrimientos que van mas alla de lo aparentemente posible se mezclan en estos relatos en los que la pasion por lo desconocido es el motor del viaje de cada hombre a ese punto a partir del cual ya no es posible regresar. Ignacio Padilla, quien ya demostro con Amphitryon (CE052), novela galardonada con el IV Premio Primavera, su enorme capacidad para construir las intrigas mas elaboradas y apasionantes, nos deleita en esta ocasion con estos doce cuentos sobre la voluntad del ser humano que lucha por sobrevivir y llegar a lo mas alto a pesar de su irremediable pequenez.
Author
Ignacio Padilla
Ignacio Padilla is the author of several award-winning novels and short story collections, and is currently the cultural attache at the Mexican Embassy in London.
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Reviews for Las antipodas y el siglo (The Antipodes and the Century)
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
3 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Though they don't make appearances in Ignacio Padilla's collection of stories Antipodes, the reader would not be surprised to see Robert E. Peary, Henry Morton Stanley or Captain Richard Francis Burton pop up somewhere in these pages. Like those 19th- and early-20th-century adventurers, Padilla's tales feature men exploring the boundaries of known civilization, as well as the limits to which a person can be pushed. These are short stories—twelve crowded into 132 pages—which are snapshots of a 19th-century world where a hallucinating Scottish engineer imagines rebuilding the city of Edinburgh in the middle of the Gobi Desert, a medical scientist finds a plague journal in the Amazon jungle (with deadly results), a cross-dresser dying of tuberculosis tries to scale Mount Everest ("a voluptuous high-heeled shoe" is later found a few paces from Sir Edmund Hillary's summit flag) and a British colonel in charge of the railway in Rhodesia is determined to get the trains running on schedule—if not, he'll shoot himself in the smoking room of the Hotel Prince Albert. As the title indicates, these stories place men at the opposite poles of the earth in their quests. Padilla, a Mexican author whose previous work in English was the 2002 novel Shadow Without a Name, writes in a carefully-crafted style reminiscent of these travelers, isolated in the jungle or halfway up Everest, feverishly scribbling longhand in journals, all the time with an eye on prosperity and ego-driven immortality. They should have saved their ink. Padilla's main goal seems to be pointing out the folly and insignificance of mankind. The Anglo characters in these vignettes are nearly always defeated by disease, natives or the wrath of nature. It's hard, really, to call these stories stories since most of them are filled with expository material. Dialogue, action and conflict are sacrificed in favor of long stretches of fable-like prose about colonialism, industrial progress and megalomania. One of the book's several problems lies in the fact that these are not so much characters as they are blurred human shapes, as indistinct and superficial as names in a history textbook. In these truncated morality tales, people take a backseat to thought and philosophical debate. In theory, there's nothing wrong with that—Diderot, Borges and Calvino all excelled at this in one way or another—but in practice, it's difficult to pull off successfully. How to keep the reader entertained while making him think? While he may be a competent (perhaps even brilliant) wordsmith, Padilla fails to engage the reader where it matters most—at the character level. History, not people, is at the forefront of Antipodes. Because each story sends the reader to a new, far-flung locale, the collection also functions as a sort of travelogue. Unfortunately, the stories are like stickers on the side of a steamer trunk. We know where the traveler has been, but those stickers won't tell us the interesting stories of his journeys.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the first I've read of Ignacio Padilla. This collection of short stories never really misses - because Padilla's writing talent is so great. However, the stories themselves do hit and miss. Still, well-worth the read as it's a quick couple of hours of reading. I believe it's probably worth a re-read as well...
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Fallido intento de Borges. Personajes que apenas merecen tal nombre, sin motivaciones que se mueven por el mundo creado por su narrador porque es necesario para que éste pueda mostrar su falsa erudición. Hay cierta preocupación por el colonialismo que por momentos parece más nostalgia que una crítica.