The XIII Tusquets Editores de Novela Award 2017 brings us a unique story. The man secluded in nature, or liberated from society in it. A Robinson of whom we will soon want to know his reasons for isolation. The Mute wanders in his particular kingdom of nothingness, of mundane emptiness, of anti-civilization. But still removed from everything, the human being faces fear and danger.
There is no hiding for man over his greatest predator: man. El Mudo enjoys sharing his days only with his dog, chastened as he is from dealing with others. Living apart from everything is perhaps the greatest wisdom. Perhaps man is not so much a social animal and rather a tribal imposition evolved until today. El Mudo knows about all this and much more. Meanwhile he continues to learn from nature, from his dog and from himself.
«In an imprecise jungle territory, near the Tragadero River, in northern Argentina, lives with his dog El Mudo, the protagonist of this story. The Mute left Resistencia seeking the calm of nature and living surrounded only by "the murmur of vegetation." He is related to Insúa, the owner of a grocery store who kept his truck in exchange for providing him with everything he needed to start life alone.
And he feels like intruders other characters who roam his territory, such as Soria, who lives with his son, or the young environmentalists from the Fundación Vida Salvaje, who once managed to get Insúa to release the alligators he had as pets into the river. without calibrating the consequences.
Amid the harshness of a hostile nature, among birds, monkeys and alligators, the reader attends with increasing tension the dangers of the river and the threats of strangers, whose true intentions we guess in a disturbing way from the eyes of the protagonist, that made a resolution not to bother anyone, or to be bothered "
You can now buy the novel A house next to the tragadero, the new book by Mariano Quirós, here: