AUTHOR: Eloy Moreno
PUBLISHER: Nube de Tinta
GENRE: Novel
READER’S NAME: Félix Lizarraga
DATE: June 13, 2020
Invisible (2018), Eloy Moreno’s fourth novel, starts in a deliberately vague, fragmented way. The novel is splintered into brief chapters (some no more than a couple of paragraphs long), which are in turn scattered into several, very different points of view. There is a woman who gets a dragon tattooed over the burn scars on her back. There is a boy in a hospital bed who tells his story in the first person (everybody else’s in told in the third person). There is a girl who wears too many bangles in one of her wrists. There is a boy who has a scar on his right eyebrow. And there is another boy who is missing half a finger.
Despite this multiplicity of voices, the novel manages to disclose very little at a time, so until about halfway into it we are still unsure of what type of story are we reading. Is this a fantasy? A story for children? A superhero story? Is it about delusion, or are the monsters and the superpowers real? Why is that boy in the hospital? Why does every character seem so paralyzed with fear and pain?
The answers come slowly, and little by little the reader starts to put all the hints together, a puzzle piece at a time. This process sounds slow and laborious; in fact, it is anything but, because Moreno writes well-rounded characters that make us care about what is happening to them, even when we are not sure what exactly is it that is happening, and even though in most cases we never learn their names.
While it is hard to talk about the main themes and subject matter of Invisible without spoilers, I think I can safely say this is a book about loneliness as well as responsibility, and about how hard it can be to connect the dots about our reality. It also explores how the echo chambers of social media can amplify and worsen certain social phenomena, but wisely refrains from blaming them for behaviors that certainly predate them. It is also, and maybe above all, a book about the pain and glory of adolescence.
And, while we learn that certain supposed superpowers of the protagonist are not real, the reality turns out to be much more interesting than the illusion. Certain fantasy elements remain ambiguous to the very end, and Moreno leaves it to the reader to decide whether or not those elements fantasy should be accepted at face value or not.
The setting of Invisible also stays purposefully ambiguous, as the characters inhabiting the novel and the events that befall them could be set in Spain as easily as in the United States or, say, Japan, for that matter.
Invisible is not without its faults; it can be too schmaltzy and, sometimes, too on the nose. But it has the rare virtue of showing every side of every issue, and of refusing to simplify its villains. If anything, it shows that no vile act happens in a vacuum, and that in some way every member of society bears responsibility for what happens to any other member of it.
Invisible is, in brief, a superb, powerfully emotional book that I heartily recommend for translation. The universality of its themes, setting, and subject matter also make it an easier candidate for translation.
