Deep down we are all a little Ignatius reilly wandering through life with our films produced and scripted by our subjectivity and also with our most recalcitrant miseries. Since Ignatius arrived in modern literature as the Quixote of our days, the surrealism of living has opened up to many new proposals that pour out that philosophy of nothingness, of vainglory, of the impossibility of reaching the levels of glory that our Spirit breathes into a soul limited by the air that fits in our lungs.
Villains with the human closeness necessary to become heroes. Losers so connected to us that we end up wishing for their grotesque glory. Characters after all that can inhabit recent detective novels such as olegaroy, by David Toscana or in a novel of acid and intelligent humor with existentialist overtones of hurtful realism such as Las cenizas y las cosas.
The world of literature is littered with budding writers who never reach that theoretical goal, which is success. And in that no man's land is where we find Niarf Yahamadi, an exotic narrator between Mexican and Iranian with the usual pretense of the writer who is understood as necessary to explain the future of the world. Except that the world still does not listen to him with much interest and his literature is lost in the limbo of insignificance.
Until from the distant town of San Ismael (so far away that it seems another world compared to New York in which the protagonist is lost) they invite him to inaugurate an auditorium. For more confusion, it is also indicated that said space will bear his name.
It seems that the echoes of his trovas shouted to the world jumped the borders and ended up taking root in another place. But the matter is so strange that Niarf will think twice about what it looks like there, guided by a strange letter that summons him to glory.
The strokes of luck can be like this, strange, unexpected. So driven by curiosity, Niarf ends up traveling to a place where finally no one expects him and whose presentation at the meeting place puzzles and uncomfortable.
It may be one of those dreams of success of the eternal aspiring writer, a vocation that can take years, a lifetime (and whose greatest achievement may reside precisely in that time of inertia that life occupies in a work, however small. let this be). Because San Ismael is shaping up like a nightmare for Niarf, an epicenter for the apocalypse of reality. The chasm of the pacific to decide to start the destruction of the world from that place.
Without knowing very well how he managed to escape from there (such that waking up from a dream as the only way out), Niarf takes the road home, that New York in which to remain nobody while waiting for the true stroke of luck. Except that nightmares tend to be chained together with ease, and the journey is not yet over.
You can now buy the novel The Ashes and Things, Naief Yehya's book, here: