The lake in the pupils

Original Language: castellano

Year of publication: 2012

Valoración: Disappointing

If this were a conference, it could be titled as ‘Disconnection: ways of writing and ways of reading’. Or, more colloquially, ‘Why there are books that may like us and yet we don’t like them’. And it is clear that I have made a generous effort for the book to like it, perhaps because it is short, perhaps because I looked like ‘. I have even considered reading it again looking for what I did not find, but I think I will not arrive.

Most of the time we have quite clear why we do not like a book, and we always blame the author, because we do not like how he writes, we are not interested in what he tells, it is too long, too superficial or too deep, unintelligible, boring, poor, poor. This time I believe that the faults would have to be distributed because, due to circumstances of the moment, my reading has been excessively fragmentary for a text that barely exceeds the hundred and fifty pages. I know that nobody cares if I read fast or slowly, of the pull or pieces, but in this case I think it can have its importance, because the story is also fragmentary, a collage of short scenes, different scenes and very different characters that surely required a much more concentrated reading.

Two of those characters, man and woman, arrive separately to Riofrío (Granada, I have looked at it) looking for information about something that has to do with their past, perhaps concrete data or rather a point of contact little defined with something related to their origins. There are somewhat harmless encounters with some residents and visits to certain places that seem to contain confusing messages and signs of a special atmosphere. Stories of the civil war and memories of countrymen arise that do not end up agreeing. With this story, that of a journalist who covered an economic summit in Switzerland, who for his part tried to write a novel about an extraterrestrial invasion, and several episodes around him around her exchanges of couples and sexual practices let’s say rare let’s say rare.

Wow, it seems to me that there is a quite appreciable heterogeneity that also enriches itself with a few secondary characters, fragments of speeches, articles and reflections on some other matter that I do not remember. Of course, all this read to Mata Salto cannot work because it is very easy to lose the thread (it is so dim, so hidden) and disconnect at all.

But, admitting my part of guilt in failure, neither do I understand the goal of the story, as conceived. The dispersion, such a used resource, serves for different purposes, but I do not find any of the possible ones in the book. Nor does I finish the variety of tones that break into my opinion in a capricious way and end up generating a feeling of general inconsistency.

Of course, it would be said that they can be first -time work tics, but it is that Don Luis writes this with about eighty years, and has a very respectable list of published books, among which this is, that I know, one of the most recent. I do not know, the same is that precisely because of its veteran and experience, I wanted to build something that I have not been able to capture, and the result worsens even for my inadequate way of approaching the text. I am not going to deny it, but since the reading, correct or not, and the review are mine, I have no choice but to conclude that the book I did not like almost anything.