When someone like Nickolas butler he launched into writing one of those life stories, in which we know the characters from their infancy to full maturity, he ran a natural risk of falling into the naive as far as the first narration of childhood ages is concerned.
But the truth is that meeting the meticulous Nelson, so perfectionist that he is strident and repellent to almost all other boys, and Jonathan, who should be his antagonist because of his halo of popularity and admiration, is emotional without easy sentimentality. Both share summer camp and from their polarized positions in terms of status they end up finding the magnetism of the opposite.
Perhaps at first it was only a question of mercy on the part of Jonathan, but what results in the end transcends that first approach to the little being humiliated by a little god of childhood. That summer of 1962 led to a chance and friendship.
Growing up is a bit of denying what you were, what you thought and what you hoped to become. The future of the boys is presented to us with its edges, with its moments of extreme disenchantment, with the violence of the contradictions and the breakdown of the defenses with which you manage to survive that denial of the child that you were.
From Nelson and Jonathan, life continues to be enigmatically extended to new generations… We left the XNUMXth century and reached the XNUMXst century. New perspectives as life opens new paths. And always, surreptitiously, both in the vital and in the merely narrative, the thread of friendship is moving, of that illusion that in childhood was full and to which we always want to return ...
You can now buy the novel The hearts of men, Nickolas Butler's new novel, here: