Galego | English

Fiction

Palabras contadas

By Camilo Franco

About this book

Palabras contadas includes over a hundred micro short stories, thirty plots for a novel and five short stories, as bonus tracks. Using the functionality of literature, the author uses, with high doses of humour and irony as well as melancholy, the most characteristic topics and genres in writing: love, death, pain and happiness.

Palabras contadas was also the base for the exhibition of the same name of the Fundación Luís Seoane, which tried to use two possibilities that may have never happened before. On the one hand there is the versatility of short narratives and on the other hand the capacity to place the word as a code and signifier in its own support in an industrial or mass culture. In general, this may be understood as an attempt to make the reader a spectator. Words and stories are at the chore of spaces that could be seen as stages. In this sense, vindicating the word as creator of spaces leads to the creation of such spaces where stories become fully meaningful. In many ways, the creation of spaces that have reading of a text at its core is to provide each story a context that completes it. It is almost a solid projection of the plot and context the author is narrating.

Book fragment

Universal history

Species are used to death but individuals are not.

Declaration of war

Twenty minutes before the declaration of war, the ultimatum demanded the submission of the central and regional governments, and all production means: mining, steelworks, the naval sector, gas pipelines, refineries, labs, electricity plants, nuclear plants, airports, the railway, dams, newspapers, radio and television stations, canning industries, shopping centres, internet service providers and women.

Fencing for K.O.

The pugilist was getting more than what he was giving.

His was contention work. He showed the top of his head amongst the sacks of his gloves and saw how those red projectiles came closer looking for the tangential line of the canvas. He tried to mislead the opponent and choreographed leg movements (tip, base, tip) trusting the rhythm to coincide with the flashes from photographers. He had lost pace with time and the strategy of elegance was turning against him. The intuition of a veteran was telling him to come out of his trench and connect with a good hit. That was another way of defending himself. In the final fight, against the twelfth round, he accepted defeat because instead of a London steak he was counting on Proust’s madeleine and, sadly, he could not fight against lost time.