Are you in the mood for a refreshing read? We recommend books with swimming pools... a little cloudy.
We turn the concept of "swimming pool book" on its head as a classic of empty entertainment and we challenge you with ten titles where swimming pools can be the scene of a crime, amniotic salvation for a wounded body, Wonderland, symbol of eroticism, Visual delicatessen or sociological landmark. Get wet and dare to immerse yourself in them, because we know that when you put on your swimsuit and the sunglasses, you don't take off your brain...
Cover of 'The Spain of swimming pools'.
1.The Spain of swimming pools, by Jorge Dioni López (Arpa Publishers).
Here is a political book It does not intend to give the ember or divide the world into good and bad. In this analysis, the purpose of the journalist Jorge Dioni López (Zamora, 1974) is to map the soul, the concrete and the tile of that Spain of swimming pools where roundabouts, clone streets and mortgages speak of who we are, of how we live and how the mistreated middle class has got here. A heterogeneous group that has stopped believing in the power of education as a social lift and has been left out in the open with only one faith: that of being owners and leaving an apartment (or two) as an inheritance to their children. But if possible in a city. The city, you know, that horizon of comfort and social advancement, but also of alienation.
With a light but rigorous style, Jorge Dioni insists that our problem is not swimming pools (“hopefully swimming pools for everyone”, he says) but rather that life in those rural enclaves favors particular solutions, isolation and withdrawal.
The author speaks knowingly, since he defines himself as a Pauer: that is to say, an inhabitant of a PAU, one of those neighborhoods built from the boom with gated communities or seas of single-family houses located on the outside of cities; small green and blue islands where people live who studied EGB, who grew up drinking Cola Cao and listening to that "my son, you can be whatever you want." Your thesis of him? That urban planning is neither aseptic nor neutral and it provokes sociological and political effects, that is, it creates ideology and not the other way around.
Cover of 'The chronology of water'.
2.The chronology of water, by Lidia Yuknavitch (Carmot Press)
Although life is rubbish, human beings do their best not to drown in the mud. Better than hate, better than fear, better than self-combustion, it will always be a swimming pool. Its smell of chlorine, its blue color, its asepsis. Perhaps that is why Lidia Yuknavich's refuge was the swimming pools. Every time her father mistreated or abused her, her dissociation occurred: her body was present, but her mind did front crawl laps. In the pool she felt safe, ethereal, fierce. Better than him. Because she was good. She was very good. She was even about to go to the Moscow Olympics, but Jimmy Carter was determined to sabotage Misha the bear and that escape route was also cut short for her body.
“I hate Carter. I hate God. I hate my father”, she writes in a powerful, stark and poetic voice. “I bled, cried, pissed and vomited. I turned into water.” And to the water she returns again and again in an eternal flight towards the amniotic fluid from which Lidia (like everyone else) was once expelled.
"The water chronology" is not autofiction, they are the punk memoirs shouted and violent strokes of a woman able to stay afloat and find, despite everything, self-love and the crazy and wonderful beauty of life. A book that fans of Angélica Liddell and not suitable for picky eaters and light literature chewers.
Cover of 'The pool'.
3.The swimming pool, by Yoko Ogawa (Tightrope walker)
"I wanted to make Rie cry and look at Jun's wet muscles." Such are Aya's desires: wet, cruel, sensual. Untold. Aya is a teenager who lives in full orphanage. Her house is a hospice run by her own parents. So her daily life is plagued by lost and rootless children vying for the attention of her saviors: Aya's parents. So despite being the only girl with a family, Aya is the most lonely, bland and erased girl in that strange world. To numb her pain she does two things: she secretly goes to the pool to watch Jun's perfect body jump off the diving board. (a boy her age with whom she is obsessed) and unleashes her cruelty on Rie, a year-and-a-half orphaned baby whom she secretly tortures.
The Japanese author Yoko Ogawa, one of the best-selling and most recognized in the Western world, returns to give us a bitter spoonful of her sinister and poetic universe in The Pool, a story of obsession starring fragile and divided beings written with the coldness of a surgeon who wields a scalpel on a body that doesn't bleed, but suffers each cut in deafening silence.
Television adaptation of Christie's work.
4.Blood in the pool, by Agatha Christie (Planet)
In this life it is always convenient and even It is essential to have a book by Ágatha Christie in your suitcase: with its predictable, but intriguing plot; with its bourgeois charm from another century, so English and at the same time so cosmopolitan; with her riddle as in a sudoku in which you have to fill in the boxes until you solve the eternal question: but who is the murderer? And with its reassuring conclusion: evil is punished. Evil does not win. Evil is not as smart as it thinks.
Blood in the pool presents the strange murder of Dr. John Christow in the swimming pool of the Angkatell family mansion. Hercule Poirot has rented a neighboring house and he is invited to dinner car night. When he arrives at the party the first thing he sees is Dr. Christow slumped at the edge of the pool and his wife Gerda with a small revolver. Poirot, like the rest of the guests, listens to the last words of the dying man: "Henriette". However, it seems to the seasoned detective that everything he is witnessing is nothing more than a staged scene. From this moment he sees involved in a case that seems obvious, but that goes awry as the members of the Angkatell family create smoke screens to prevent access to the truth.
Cover of 'Empty Pools'.
5. Empty swimming pools, by Laura Ferrero (Calligram)
"There are many types of noise. There is noise from the street. The one with the birds at dawn. The one about the things that suddenly arrive and the one about those that leave”, writes Laura Ferrero in one of the stories of Empty Pools, a minimalist prodigy loaded with truth and great literature, which was her debut feature and the most direct antecedent of her latest novel, People do not exist. Her stories are seemingly small: a woman who can't sleep and goes to the living room to listen to the hum of the television. A father who blows out the candles in front of his son, who is also a father. A girl who writes a love story to a girl she won't meet. A grandfather who speaks to a photograph. A man and a woman waving goodbye on a street corner. They do not know each other but similar things happen to all of them, that is, life, with its trifles but also with its big questions: how does one fall in love, why love that is not spent hardens, What is it that scares us? Is this the language of empty swimming pools?
Cover of 'Summer house with swimming pool'.
6. Summer house with swimming pool, by Herman Korch (Salamander)
Herman Korch is one of the best-selling authors in the Netherlands and A decade ago he conquered the international public with his novel La cena. The continuation of it (although it can be read completely independently) is Summer house with swimming pool, where explores contemporary issues such as the uneasiness of the family, the difficult communication between parents and children or the falsity of social relationships, as well as desire, guilt or the desire for revenge within a permissive and self-indulgent society.
The protagonist of it is a family doctor in Amsterdam, Marc Schlosser, a nondescript character? of sharp and misogynistic thinking, with the cynicism of a Dr. House in a European version. His large clientele especially appreciate the time he spends in consultation, but this apparent generosity hides less noble intentions that Marc skillfully conceals. When one of his patients, the famous actor Ralph Meier, invites him to spend a few summer days with his family, Marc accepts despite the reluctance of Caroline, his wife, annoyed by Ralph's arrogant vulgarity and his irresistibly seductive attitude.
Thus, the Schlossers and the Meiers, with their respective teenage children, they will share a house with a swimming pool with a mature Hollywood director (who is incisively reminiscent of Roman Polanski) and his girlfriend, forty years younger. a few kilometers from a Mediterranean beach. The days go by with peaceful monotony, between meals, walks, long conversations after dinner, excesses with alcohol and more or less innocent flirtations, until one night a serious incident occurs that will interrupt the vacation and will forever change the relationship between the two families. With an air of a thriller, a fast prose, and echoes of Chabrol's cinema, you will drink it like a glass of cold water on a sultry summer day... and when it passes through the throat you will realize that in reality that transparent liquid was vodka.
One of the illustrations of 'Of Swimmers and Pools'.
7.Of swimmers and pools, by Manuel Moranta (Trampa Editions)
Manuel Moranta lived his childhood and adolescence surrounded by seven brothers in a secluded house with a pool. One day he broke down the pool motor and they never repaired it. So from that moment on they had to live with that blue hole in the center of his familiar universe. That space excavated on the ground has served the visual poet Manuel Moranta to weave a story about the family shelter and its relationship with the universe. through aphoristic poems and very blue drawings.
A trip from the pool to the ocean that helps him to tell universal ideas from insignificant things. "You take it all away. Now you are as God brought you into the world./ You feel the breeze in your hair and on your skin.// This pool is yours, forever». A space of lightness and oxygen built with what the author calls his "drawing phrases", or what is the same, "an aphorism in which the word gives half of its country to the drawing" and with which he intends to make people laugh, make them dream and make them think.
A book full of charm and beauty to immerse yourself or let yourself drift into the italics that are waves and other unusual and playful elements of his multisensory poetry.
Cover of 'Swimming pool'.
8.Swimming Pool, by Maria Svarbova (New Heroes & Pioneers)
The Slovak photographer Maria Svarvoba conquered her artistic space and her attention in networks thanks to the images of her in public swimming pools from the Soviet era. With an almost theatrical quality and highly controlled settings, the visual universe of Svarvoba is characterized by the geometric and sterile beauty of ancient pools in combination with hieratic human figures and clones, swimmers as soft and cold as pool tiles, where pastel colors gently vibrate in a dreamy atmosphere, wrapping everything in a pop and retro patina.
Her initial success was on Instagram, where she was discovered the designer Josep Font, who came to inspire one of her collections for Delpozo in the visual keys of the Slovak artist. After her, they have claimed her for fashion editorials in the best magazines in the world, such as Vogue, as well as advertising campaigns for brands such as Apple. She has just announced that in the fall she will release a new photo book with her usual publisher, meanwhile, we can continue immersed in her iconic book Swimming Pool.
9.Why do we swim, by Bonnie Tsui (Planet)
The human being has chosen to swim even though he has an absolutely earthly body. The reasons, according to Bonnie Tsui, “that it is an introspective, silent sport, in the midst of a chaotic and noisy world. Which is therapeutic for the body and mind. An adventurous way of moving, a way to reach that ecstatic state of flow. And because swimming teaches to know fear and overcome it”. Also for survival, of course, and for food needs: swimming has not been a coincidence.
Plagued with wonderful historical anecdotes –like that in the year 400 B.C. the romans had already invented the life jacket (cork) or that in the fourteenth century the pearl divers of Persia used translucent turtle shells as goggles in their dives– Bonnie Tsui's Why We Swim is an investigation into what draws us to water, despite its dangers, and why we constantly return to it. Her author, the daughter of "a bikini-clad beauty" and a "tanned lifeguard" who met at a Hong Kong swimming pool, she has created an enthusiastic, reflective and fluid text that combines history, journalism and memory in just the right doses.
Covers of 'The pool'.
10.The swimming pool, by Ji Hyeon Lee (Barbara Fiore Editor)
A century and a half after Lewis Carroll plunged his Alice into a fantastic world Through the Looking Glass, South Korean illustrator and visual artist Ji Hyeon Lee provides a magnificent contemporary equivalent with The Pool, her first illustrated album: a silent masterpiece in which space, scale and silence converge to create a fascinating underwater world of a swimming pool where there are apparently nothing but people bathing.
But nothing is bland in the eyes of the creative imagination. When the protagonist boy overcomes his fears and finally jumps, he finds himself in the water with an unexpected companion: a girl moved by the same shy curiosity. Together, they travel further to the edge of another world, where the pool morphs into an underwater wonderland teeming with strange and beautiful creatures. In short, another illustrated delicatessen from the Bárbara Fiore publishing house, specialized in making us happy.