I am one of those who think that it begins by thinking that reading a dramatic novel is not going to give me anything. To suffer that reality is already recalcitrantly bent on murdering dreams, as Bunbury would say.
But being determined to discard the tragic may not always be the best option. Because sometimes there are books that offer that kind of sublimation that goes beyond so many hackneyed aspects of resilience as a vital coaching formula.
There are books that simply tell you sad stories, with no other intention than to give them a final chance to get us out of fatalism, out of that pessimism that appears when bad news comes to stay ...
Nicolas could be any of us, with that exhausting feeling of having to be strong to face something crumbling next to us. It is no longer that we suffer from the disease from within, but rather that we have to contemplate it from the outside with the imperative of being the shaft of a reality that points to the imminent collapse.
At times, the pact between Nicolas and his wife with cancer sounds like one more nod to those topics about resilience for therapists outside of one's own skin. But if you give it a chance, something will end up moving from within, with the satisfaction that you have been told a story of weaknesses, doubts, insomnia and luck, of that damned luck that in the end makes sure that the shadows are go. A story that is none other than that of the author himself ...
Only by the way of luck you have to put something on your part. And nothing better than evasion, than the music of Nicolas or the literature of Éric himself to stop looking at death in the face and just wait for that stroke of luck from a deviant focus that shows a point of contempt for the grim reaper, to Let her feel ignored and walk away
Eric writes his new novel because his wife asks him to do so while she fights the battle. Likewise, Nicolás, the protagonist of this novel is locked in his music and in a symphony that breathes life under the baton of death.
Because she, Matilde, Nicolás's wife, also needs to look the other way, lose herself in the new chords of Nicolás's music, live another life while her body yearns for that fortune in the form of unpredictable cellular evolution.
And the symphony comes to an end and the stories of Éric or Nicolás may or may not converge ...
Music and literature, character and author, reality and fiction. The story that Éric tells us may be like that painting of Dorian Gray, the canvas in which the decay of the sickly essence was trapped, in a loft where we never again expect to have to go up to look for absolutely nothing.
You can now buy the novel The Conjugal Bedroom, the new book by Éric Reinhardt, here: