macabre dance between doubt and hope – liberation
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Twilight, this is the word that comes first to define the novel by Victor Del Arbol. Once again, the Spanish author wonders about guilt, innocence, forgiveness, and leaves us on the side when completing the reading of this upset book. From The sadness of the samuraipublished in 2012, the novelist reflects on the mechanisms of violence, in particular on children. In this first book, a child let go of his mother’s hand and this gesture decided with his whole life. More recently, in The father’s sonthe writer revolved around the curse of the men of a family « Infected with the virus of misfortune and self -destruction ».
A former police officer at the miners’ brigade, Victor Del Arbol knows the impunity of the executioners. Today, his hero is called Julian Leal. This inspector is deposited by a taxi, on the Galician coast, in February 2005. He wanted to review the places of his childhood, « The Calvary House » Who burned in 75, leaving the corpse of his murdered father in the rubble. You might think it is a pilgrimage but all the inhabitants know it, Leal comes to stir the shit. He did not forget this early morning when his mother told him to hide when four men approached. Thirty years later, the cop may be struck off from the police because the past still does not pass.
Julian Leal, his kidney cancer who threatens him, his memories that obsess him, his crazy desire to save a kid who looks like him, is therefore the first important character in the novel. But you have to give pride of place to the police duo, inspector Virginia Ortiz and her detestable but honest assistant, Soria. Both, opposite but convinced, want to understand why Leal prefers to be silent. Will also come Clara, plagued by drugs that makes her servile, and especially Chinchilla, the kid martyred by adults, filmed, destroyed, who will never forget.
Victor del Arbol then composed a macabre dance, seeking less to resolve a criminal investigation than to probe souls, understand why and how you choose your camp. He studies monsters, follows the victims and knows perfectly well that purity does not exist, that we can just try to save the most fragile because they are like you.
To this composition which seems first complex but is ingenious, it is necessary to add a hat to the writing which suggests the silences, the pain, the lies. « How many versions can contain the same truth? » asks Julian to Virginia. The author cuts these versions to the scalpel to close his story between doubt and hope, since « No one on this land is innocent, no one forgets, no one forgives ».
