Natural disasters, by Pablo Simonetti

Natural disasters
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There are differences between some parents and children that suppose inaccessible slopes through which love seems to fall, or on the contrary, that are unattainable in its escalation. The worst thing is to find yourself in the intermediate zone, without knowing if you are going up or down, with the risk of falling over the edge at every moment, suffering from moral and generational differences.

The biggest victims, in the end, are usually the children. And I think that's the case with Marco. At adulthood, Marco is unable to reconcile with his past, with that stage in the family that he longs for would have passed differently. Only a small moment emerges like a sprout of hope. There was an instant for the connection between him and his father, during a trip, so remote in memory as perhaps disturbed by memory and for a time that ended up punishing Marco too much.

But Marco needs to rebuild himself, rebuild himself with some hint of success, of rootedness to what he was. Feeling guilty for a sexuality ends up being a Freudian problem with unforeseeable consequences, and he wants to no longer suffer that punishment, that internalized guilt due to his father's misunderstanding.

Marco ends up undressing the reader, showing that space where the human passes from childhood to adulthood, with all the tensions typical of leaving adolescence, multiplied in his case by the marked discovery of his essence, a reality without possible fit with the family ideology.

Marco would have liked to have thought that he could ever hug his father asking for forgiveness. And that his father had assured him that there was nothing to forgive. But it never happened like that, and Marco ended up transitioning between his nascent sexuality and his traumas. And the reader discovers everything, with the same intensity as if it were put under the skin of the character.

In the scenery of a changing Chile, with the detail of some of those natural disasters that the title of the book announces, we discover a suggestive metaphor between worlds that fall apart at times, that succumb to the earthquakes that arise from within the earth and from the emotions.

You can now buy the novel Natural disasters, by Pablo Simonetti, here:

Natural disasters
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