The eve of almost everything, by Víctor del Arbol

The title already captures the sensation of fatal premonition that governs this crime novel. Fate conspires to attract and intertwine the broken souls of characters who share gloomy pasts and gloomy existences. The characters are very different on the real plane, the one that focuses on social roles, origins and dedication. But that reality is relegated to the background as we discover how they all share a similar empty perspective on the world. Absences, traumas, losses, violence, disappointments. The tragic feeling is what makes us see the characters as soul mates on that plane of subjective existence, far beyond the particular circumstances and the real road traveled.

If the character of Germinal Ibarra were he not police, the story would pass for a dramatic novel of astonishing depth, with the particular worlds of its characters redefining the reality of each scene. Existential tourism to the heart of nature in the Death Coast. Only suitable for lovers of the most exquisite literature; where a sunrise, the bravery of the sea, the dense fog or the silent stillness of a town are dramatized by the character-guide on duty, who faces the intense experience in that space where their thoughts and feelings float transforming everything what surrounds you.

In spite of everything, the plot progresses lightly in a surprising way. Victor of the Tree he knows how to summarize the existential descriptive heaviness (heaviness in terms of gravity that magnetizes the characters with their past), with the lightness of an action that slides thanks to so many pending issues. The plot progresses thanks to the search for the reasons for each character to become what they are, the reasons for their injuries.

From the search to repair some victims of the Argentine dictatorship, until the impossible recomposition of mothers who lose their children, going through the stories of children forced out of childhood brutally and by sensitive souls that they did not know, nor do they even know, nor can they find their place in the world.

Undoubtedly a tragic cosmos of personalities that flash in the deep darkness, with the now usual literary resource of flashbacks that turns the story into a puzzle, everything slightly removed (like a good cocktail) thanks to the police investigation aspect that the good de Ibarra is concerned with personifying as a common thread for so many and so many vespers of almost everything.

Only at the end, an undeniable point of hope seems to convey the calm of some of the survivors themselves. Those who after completely breaking their soul against the rocks can chart a new voyage. Those who are gone and those who, despite everything, continue to cling to the past seem to remain as we found them, mired in those evens that never announce a holiday.

You can now buy The Eve of Almost Everything, the latest novel by Víctor del Arbol, here: