AUTHOR: Ricardo Menéndez Salmón
PUBLISHER: Seix Barral
GENRE: Fiction
READER’S NAME: Julia Cisneros Fitzpatrick
DATE: May 24, 2022

This is a that book has legs that would run a good race in this American society, which is in crisis on many fronts, particularly in trying to redefine what freedom means. Is it constrained by individual rights vs. the common good, as in an act as simple as the wearing of masks in a pandemic? In his creation of a dystopic world in which freedom is vitally curtailed through repression and terror—that is what Menéndez Salmón has given us, a parable of a future vision of a world in which words and books have been severely banned and destroyed, on pain of death to objectors. The horror is enforced by children, who decided, in a dim past lost in memory, that words were lies and corrupt and could not be trusted. It is a silent and a silenced world.

“Él” is the name of the hero whose path we follow, accompanied by an inordinately intelligent monkey, one of a horde of formerly jailed ones. In his first act of rebellion against the dystopia, Él opens all the cages and lets the monkeys go out into a freedom that he himself lacks. His ensuing search for remembering words and recovering words and books and finding other people who remember and value them, that is the thread we follow. And, as invariably happens in the author’s dystopic world, (spoiler alert) the hero does not fare well. We’ve seen this futuristic scenario for decades, as in George Orwell’s “1984” (1948) and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” (1932) and more recently, “The Hunger Games.” 

This novel, “Horda” too, could end up as a hit film. But images would have to somehow recreate the poetic flow of the words of Menéndez Salmón. Images are forever present in that world through the device, Magma, that projects them on inside and outside walls and everywhere else, imaging taking the place of words which no longer exist. A good translator would rise to the challenge to recreate the images with words, as the book’s author has done. There is suspense and danger—and violence happens, from the first two pages, but it is described with simple words without resorting to gore.