That newborn was Contreras’s mother, who from her accident and subsequent amnesia would gain and lose the ability to hear voices, but retain one to be in two places at once. Her grandfather, called Nono, was a charming, philandering, illiterate man with a steel trap of a memory who once threatened his wife and newborn with a machete after one of his ominous premonitions. Contreras comes from a lineage of curanderos, or healers. “This is a memoir of the ghostly,” writes Ingrid Rojas Contreras in her author’s note to The Man Who Could Move Clouds, “which celebrates cultural understandings of truth that are, at heart, Colombian.” The memoir, unusually, finds its center in acts of forgetting-two bouts of amnesia, one experienced by the author’s mother at age eight, having fallen (or perhaps been pushed) down a well, and Contreras’s at age 23, after a bike accident.
So, here it is, the Brodie-scale best books of 2022: a highly subjective list of some personal favorites-bestsellers worth the hype, titles that flew more under the radar than merited, and everything in between-from the staff of Vanity Fair. But at best, the list is a discoverability tool, and in 2022, in a world brimming with content, we do like to help the crème de la crème rise. When it comes to books and Italian painters, best is in the eye of the beholder. And second, that some would argue that, like Valentine’s Day and very tight jeans, at worst the year-end best-of list exists solely to make most people feel bad-at another worst, it’s here for the clicks. Best! Sorry to do this, but let’s establish some ground rules with a definition: in the Webster’s International Dictionary, Second Edition (the largest dictionary I own, and therefore the best) it’s “having good qualities in the highest degree.” So, first, it should be said that this leaves some room for interpretation.
Best movies, best podcasts, best television, best books. “The answer is Giotto, he is my favorite.” “Who is the greatest Italian painter?” the titular character of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie asks her students.
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