Juebreverías

Synopsis

For years, every Thursday afternoon, a WhatsApp group called the Camarote Microrrelatista waited eagerly for Rafa Olivares's weekly entry to Cadena SER's Relatos en Cadena competition. The brief was simple: take a phrase provided by the programme and resolve it in a handful of words. What began as a game of wit among friends became, over time, a genre of its own — one Olivares himself named the Juebreve: a nano-story of between forty and fifty words, precisely the length of a tweet, that had to open with that week's phrase and close with a twist no reader could see coming. Juebreverías brings together two hundred and sixty of those pieces, selected from years of weekly output with the help of three exceptional first readers. Many of them share the same opening line and are presented in pairs, showing how a single prompt can branch into two entirely different stories: one might end with a joke about insufferable brothers-in-law, the other with an uncomfortable observation about old age or euthanasia. Alongside the Juebreves sit sixteen even more compressed pieces — a maximum of one hundred and forty characters each — written for the Cuenta 140 competition in El Cultural, and a closing calligram in which the arrangement of the text on the page becomes the book's final joke. Olivares respects no boundaries in his choice of subject matter: the Bible, fairy tales, History with a capital H, Spanish politics and the most recognisable corners of domestic life all share the same pages, always under the lens of a dark humour that takes aim at death, the Church, old age and the family itself without asking anyone's permission. The prologue by Pablo Núñez conjures its own small mythology — that of the philosopher Ireneo Ripalda, beaten to death with a club in Vinaroz for shouting 'Eureka' — as a way of accounting for a talent that, in his view, is rooted in the tradition of Ramón Gómez de la Serna's greguerías. Between pieces, fifteen photographs of Mediterranean dawns taken by Olivares himself serve as obligatory pauses: breathing spaces designed to prevent, as the author himself warns, indigestion from an overdose of Juebreves. The result is a book built to be read in controlled doses — one that, despite its extreme brevity, leaves an uncomfortable and lasting residue about what makes us laugh and why, precisely, we ought to feel a little guilty for it.

Machine translation, pending review.