Post honen idazlea: Slawka Grabowska
Territorios improbables, Pedro Torrijos
Kailas, 2021
333 or.
ISBN 978-84-17248-82-6
Post hau ingelesez dago.
Territorios improbables. Historias sobre lugares que (casi) no sabías que existían by Pedro Torrijos is a non-fiction book that I discovered by chance on Twitter. I came across something precious: the author’s thread about “Villa Demencia”, a town in the Netherlands where everything is false so that people with dementia or Alzheimer’s can lead a life as similar as possible to their lives before the disease. I’m not going to go into details, the thread is in the author’s profile and it’s worth reading. I loved Pedro’s way of writing and seeing that he has a book, I didn’t hesitate to read it.
Territorios improbables is published by Kailas Editorial, the same publishing house that publishes Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan in Spain. The book is divided into 5 thematic blocks: What Is No Longer There, What Is in front of Us but We Do Not See, What We Cannot Stop Seeing, What We Do Not Want to Look at and What Should Not Exist. Each of them begins with a preface and contains 10 descriptions of “treasures of contemporary archaeology”, cities or buildings different from the others, which have something surprising, something that makes them worthy of being called “improbable territories”.
Whatever I say, I’ll fall short. Pedro Torrijos’ ease in disseminating his knowledge of architecture is amazing. Without falling into technical and incomprehensible terms, he describes strange places that we immediately want to see with our own eyes. We learn about its origins, its reason for being or its impossibility to continue being. The tone of the writing is light, with jokes and unexpected comparisons that often make us smile or even laugh. In the book coexist the Instant City of Ibiza, the witch windows, the UFO cities of Taiwan and many, many more. They are all amazing places and some look like something out of a horror movie, like the Island of the Dolls in Mexico, others sound like a joke, like Heritage USA, a theme park dedicated to Jesus Christ. In total 50 chapters with very different places, but with something in common: its originality and rarity.
In theory it isn’t a book about travelling and yet it has awakened in me the need to visit many of the places mentioned by the author. I would like to see them with my own eyes knowing all their history that Torrijos tells us in the book.