Ricardo Blanco’s Blog

• Contagious Fictions: Love in the Time of Cholera
  I never fully appreciated Love in the Time of Cholera when it first appeared, back in the 1980s. I was still in thrall to the García Márquez of One Hundred Years of Solitude,and while acknowledging the meticulous skill... Read More
• Contagious Fictions: tracing truths in Saramago’s Blindness
  During the opening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic many of us tuned in every evening to hear the latest statistics of the newly infected and the dead. As the figures mounted, this morbid need to know became a... Read More
• Journal of the Plague Year (iii)
    Reading over the third set of entries, from May, the events described already appear distant, dreamlike, as though they happened in an adjacent or parallel world. Did Trump really suggest we inject ourselves with detergent? It seems... Read More
• Journal of the Plague Year (ii)
    Continuing with my journal entries over the first three months of COVID-19, here are two entries for the month of April. During this period the roads around the city were gloriously silent, and many more birds appeared... Read More
• Journal of the Plague Year (i)
    As the coronavirus pandemic began to sweep the world, the Argentine writer Jorge Fondebrider wrote to friends and fellow writers around the world, asking for contributions to a Journal of the Plague Year (in homage to Defoe’s... Read More