The trial of Roberto Lanza by Ronaldo Menéndez

The process of Roberto Lanza
by Ronaldo Menendez

A MISUNDERSTANDING CAN TURN PARENTING INTO HELL

A brave and provocative novel about the evils of our time

One afternoon, when Roberto Lanza is preparing to pick up his five-year-old son after leaving a Madrid school, the teacher asks him for explanations about a suspicion of pedophilia that has provoked something the boy said. This is the trigger for a hybrid story between a psychological thriller, a social novel and a Kafkaesque plot with a frenetic pace and high narrative tension. The environment judges without evidence and guilt hangs over the protagonist’s life, as in The Trial, turning it into a sudden hell where neither love nor friendships are safe territory. In the schoolyard, any comment is a source of paranoia in the complex and atypical psyche of Roberto Lanza. The crossroads that are offered to him take him down high-risk paths and decisions that almost no one would understand.

With a strong emotional charge and written with precise and elaborate language, we are faced with a novel whose plot becomes a pretext to unleash controversy, criticize paradigms accepted as current “values” in the education of children, and establish a deep reflection on marital happiness, sexuality, the relationship between parents and children and individual freedom. What happens when parenting becomes not only a challenge, but also a source of pain, lies, and frustration? The trial of Roberto Lanza is a story that connects with the existentialist tradition in its most updated version of taboo topics and complex emotions.

He was born in Havana in 1970. Considered one of the leaders of current Cuban literature, he has published more than a dozen books. His novels “Las bestias” and “Río Quibú” have become, over the years, cult books. “The House and the Island” (2016) was a great success among critics and the public. He was part of the Bogotá 39 group, which brought together the 39 Latin American writers under forty years of age whose career is presented as the most outstanding. Some of his works have been translated into Italian, Portuguese and French. He has collaborated with various journalistic media, travel magazines, chronicles and profiles in Europe, the United States and Latin America, including: “Esquire”, “Etiqueta Negra”, “Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos”, “Eñe” and the newspaper “El País” . Ronaldo is the founder of the Billar de Letras writing school, in Madrid, the city where he has lived for a decade. Also available from Ronaldo Menéndez in AdN: «The house and the island«.