One of the most anticipated returns of the Spanish fictional narrative has been that of a Juan Manuel de Prada that from his youthful beginnings he always manifested himself as an immeasurable creative genius. Beyond its media condition, its articles and its manifest love for an ideology of color whatever, its literature composes a varied, exuberant and deeply humanistic scenography.
With the virtuosity that characterizes him, the author addresses once again the figure of the writer as the protagonist to facilitate that access to a character in search of essences and obstinate with stripping reality to show his beauty but also horror, if appropriate.
In this novel, de Prada gives a new twist to his imaginary, capable of fitting into various scenarios, to offer us a noir novel of the existential, a thriller of impossible love, of the guilt and secrets of the past that each one deals with to bury even for oneself.
Deep down, Juan Manuel de Prada may be right when he portrays an Alejandro Ballesteros (so recurrent in his bibliography as to call him an alter ego), given over to literature but abandoned by the muses until he meets Lucia. Because Lucía is that strange glow of extreme vitalism made creativity, focus and sustenance from which to begin to connect the loose ends of any story, including her own.
Every writer like Alejandro would like to find his particular Lucia, the one who captivates him but also immerses him in unsuspected dangers or in the deepest existential hesitations, since Lucia places him in a plane where he can feel like the protagonist of his best plot . It would be wonderful to write if you could occupy different souls to tell a multitude of new stories. And Alejandro Ballesteros is the perfect skin to inhabit (as Almodóvar would title) other worlds and other perspectives on our reality.
The passion of the writer Alejandro Ballesteros becomes a mixture of vitalism and anxiety. Suddenly he himself is a story half told by Lucia, until he decides to disappear or until misfortune separates her from him.
It is then that Alejandro understands that he had her there, by his side, providing her with whispers like caresses in murky nights where she looked like a lost angel. Lucía is undoubtedly his most necessary muse and finding her will become his only motive, his motor and his will above anything else.
Lucia's most vehement search will move Alejandro through the spaces where the sketches of the blackest stories are written, among mythical characters of temptation and perdition; spaces that pose situations brought from a lyrical epic that surpasses a writer abandoned until now to the mundane, to boredom, to an insignificance in front of which Lucia reaches even greater splendor.
You can now buy the novel Lucía en la noche, the new book by Juan Manuel de Prada, here: