AUTHOR: Luis Landero
PUBLISHER: TusQuets Editores
GENRE: Novel, fiction
READER’S NAME: Adan Griego
DATE: June 6, 2022

Award-winning author Luis Landero's latest novel is, at first glance, a simple love story: Marcial, who works at a meat processing factory, falls for a beautiful woman, Pepita.  The object of the protagonist's affection embodies everything that he envies in life: she is beautiful, elegant, well-educated and of higher social standing. But she is clearly out of reach for a working class, self-taught man like Marcial, even if he can quote Kafka and is familiar with Kandinsky’s art. All of which he learned from “reading the internet” or from Reader’s Digest (also known as Selecciones in Spanish).

From the start this first-person narrative already hints at multiple levels of complexity. Afterall, love stories are anything but simple, right? The text opens with Marcial telling his story, several years later, as instructed to do by a Dr. Gomez. The reader may ask, is this a sort of therapy? Perhaps, but the narrative is full of uncertainties often lost in detailed explanations, at times distracting. The protagonist already senses the reader's impatience as he confesses: "I know digressions are annoying...but in my case they are part of my way of being."

Fully aware that Pepita is out of reach for him, Marcial nonetheless manages to get four meetings with her, every time devising a complex plan to get another date. The story adds other characters that come and go: a close male friend from the factory, two other women with whom the narrator has a romantic liaison, but the obsession with Pepita permeates the narrative.

Then Marcial gets the much-coveted invitation to his beloved’s house to participate in a “tertulia” or meeting of artists and scholars gathered to discuss diverse topics for the evening.  It’s at this point when the story reaches a crescendo with two additional texts woven into the narrative, leading to an unexpected, almost surreal ending that feels out of place.

Landero wrote the novel during the height of total confinement in Spain. Given that “pandemic narratives” are likely to emerge as a genre, one could argue that this Kafkaesque story belongs to this category, even if the virus itself is not conspicuously present. However, it is a challenging text to introduce Landero to a broad English-speaking audience beyond a handful of Anglophone literary critics already familiar with his work.