Diario inútil

Creator: Ricardo Áñez Montiel

Title: Diario inútil

Date: 2025

Language: Spanish

Description: This book doesn’t set out to confirm anything the reader hasn’t already suspected—but it does so from an unexpected angle. What is a diary when it exceeds its own form? And what is a novel when it resists being one? It is not an intimate diary, though it contains confessions. Nor is it an essay, though it thinks with precision. It is a gesture of writing—of persistence, of inquiry. Diario inútil is not a book to be read straight through; it is something to be traversed—like navigating a city without a map. It is yet another attempt to capture what happens in the very moment it unfolds. A belated record of uninvited thoughts, fleeting scenes, human bewilderments, and convictions that unravel by the first paragraph. There is no linear journey, only movement. No moral, but echoes. Ricardo Añez Montiel does not write to please or to dazzle. He writes like someone circling around something that cannot be fully named, yet insists on being present. And what if the point is not to arrive, but to linger at the margins? At times, something seems about to begin. As if, on the next page, the text will find a recognizable shape, a clear direction. But it doesn’t. The diary persists. It advances, recedes, stalls, disperses. It seeps into the crevices of the everyday: a domestic argument, a taxi ride, a wait at the hospital, a trip to the cinema. And what if the extraordinary resided precisely in the unnoticed? Nothing happens—and everything happens. The narrative voice offers no answers, nor does it seek them. It observes. And in observing, it proposes another way of inhabiting time. This book resists classification. It shifts registers, tests paths, moves with the freedom—illusory or not—of a personal diary and the intuition that any novel today might be anything. Diario inútil makes no effort to conform—nor does it need to. It moves across the surface of the everyday like someone digging, allowing what is fragmentary, unexpected, and seemingly minor to reveal a deeper resonance. Perhaps that, in the end, is what literature most urgently needs—or at the very least, the most honest thing it can offer. (Publisher's synopsis, translated from the Spanish by Archivo Venezuela)

Subject: Venezuelan literature, contemporary literature, diary fiction, literary experimentation, fragmented narrative, personal writing, introspection, everyday life, nonlinear narrative, urban experience, philosophical reflection, human perplexity, confessional writing, literary search, observation, temporality, literary form, hybrid genres, Ricardo Áñez Montiel, 21st century literature, ordinary moments, narrative voice, literary honesty

Type: Text

Format: Printed book

Rights: External resource

Relation:

Tags: 21st century literature, confessional writing, contemporary literature, diaries, diary fiction, Everyday life, fragmented narrative, hybrid genres, Introspection, literary experimentation, literary form, literary search, nonlinear narrative, nonlinear narratives, observation, ordinary moments, personal narratives, personal writing, philosophical reflection, Ricardo Áñez Montiel, temporality, urban experience, Venezuelan literature

Citation: Ricardo Áñez Montiel, Diario inútil, Enero editorial, 2025, ISBN: 9786316618283, accessed September 22, 2026, https://archivovenezuela.com/en/items/show/1111

Diario inútil

Conversación con Ricardo Áñez Montiel sobre arquitectura, literatura y cultura

Publisher's page at Enero Editorial (Spanish)

Book launch and synopsis on Enero Editorial's Instagram (Spanish)

Essay and excerpts in Casapaís (Spanish)

Selection of texts and note on Diario inútil (B-sides) in MenteKupa (Spanish)