It burns Shanghai

Javier Martín Ríos, Burns Shanghai, Granada, Publishing house Alhulia, 2007.

China is turning into a reference place in the world and in Spain every day there are more the books that appear in the bookstores that there are helping us to understand the culture and the society of the Asian colossus. In the field of the literature, there are still small the writers who are taking China as a literary motive, although we see that the tendency is changing in the last times with the appearance of a limited group of Spanish writers who live in this distant ground or are closely tied by this country. One of them is Javier Martín Ríos, who has just published his last book after his experience lived in Shanghai.

It burns Shanghai it is a luck of narrative newspaper which principal protagonist is one of the cities that is destined to be one of the centers of world reference of the XXIst century and that there are already great the observers who think that it is going to occupy the place that has had New York in the XXth century. The author, from the privileged look of the foreigner who knows with depth the Chinese culture, turns into a walker of exception who talks with the past and the present of a city in which the future of the new China is projected.

In the metropolis with more skyscraper of the world, in the big metropolis where China and Occident have hit and coexisted since Shanghai was turning into one of the most important international ports of Asia from the ends of the XIXth century, the author constructs his own vision of the city by means of small started scraps of every day while it is walking along his streets and his most emblematic historical corners, where the personal experience is interlacing with the collective memory of Shanghai.

The whole book is written by a lyric prose of big beauty and a risky format, where the newspaper, the brief story or the poem in prose come together to recreate the literary ambience of one of the most promising cities of the XXIst century.

Copyright © 2004 www.wuhancom.net