Sunday, April 2, 2023, 00:11
Juan José Millás is a writer whose work often brings together the real and the dreamlike. In his latest novel, the protagonist enters into some stories and somehow even relates to the characters in them, even if it is to warn them, without much success, of the dangers that lie in wait for them.
The starting point of ‘Solo smoke’ is already disturbing: an 18-year-old learns of the death of his father in a motorcycle accident. The point is that this father left the family home many years ago and the protagonist barely has memories of him. He has now become the owner of a flat and everything inside it. And among the things he finds there is a notebook in which he talks about a dead daughter when she was just a few years old. The mother of that girl was, as he immediately deduces, a neighbor of her father’s, with whom the young man soon established a relationship of some trust.
From there, it is not only disturbing for him how much he is discovering about that father he barely knew. On his nightstand he discovers a book of children’s stories that he was apparently reading in the days before his death. And reading some of the stories in that volume (‘Cinderella’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’) causes a kind of doubling to take place so that the young man enters the stories they tell while he is physically lying on the bed that was his progenitor.
A literary game that Millás dominates and that shows, once again, that the limits between reality and fiction are never too clear.