The love of lonely men, by Victor Heringer

Títutulus original: The love of single men

Translation: Francisco Cardemil Pérez

Year of publication: 2024

Valoración: Highly recommended

The best possible recommendation of this novel is made by Zadie Smith in the flap:

“At the end of it, one has the desire to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, strengthely his hand and congratulate him for the beginning of a brilliant race. But Victor Hester is no longer there. He left leaving this beautiful book behind.”

Indeed, this book is beautiful. Tragic but beautiful. Heringer tells us a story of discovery of life, friendship and desire for a young family of the periphery of Rio de Janeiro whose peaceful adolescent life is altered by the arrival at his home of a young man adopted by whom he will feel irremediably attracted. This arrival will disrupt the precarious stability of a family life darkened by the father’s collusion with the mother’s dictatorship and mental imbalance, and will forever mark Camilo’s vital trajectory, our protagonist.

Around always, the threatening environment of crime, drugs and physical violence that suffocates the lives of the inhabitants of the suburbio in which he lives and from which he tries to escape and who returns in a last attempt to redeem and find a meaning to a life that was paralyzed by a tragic event is always. Camilo’s diagnosis about his life is devastating: “I grew up sadder than a dove. I became a useless, bitter and dirty adult. I can barely find beauty in things.”

With these wicker we could find ourselves faced with a story that could be bleak, sad, stark, but Heringer writes with great tenderness and delicacy and throws luminosity and hope on some lives that pass to the edge of the tragedy.

Indeed, it is a shame that HERinger is no longer with us. Reading this excellent novel can be our best tribute.

Signed: José Miguel Martínez