I dont know what i would think Daniel Defoe This Iberian Robinson Crusoe with evident parody overtones that in the end ends up being oriented more to a current humorous criticism in which it is shown that survival beyond the era of connectivity is possible, in the best of interpretations.
Manuel is a luck of maqui of our days that flees to a remote place of that Spain full of small towns full of echoes and oblivion. And there, in the middle of nowhere, Manuel becomes a fugitive ascetic. Ever since he stabbed the policeman, moved by his rebellious spirit that placed him in the most inappropriate place at the right time, he decides to escape the clutches of a justice that claims him for his improvised crime of blood.
It is then that the novel becomes a regression with a comic vision and with a deep point of acid criticism. Regression because with Manuel we rediscover the most unique aspects of a simple life, disconnected from noise, delivered to the day-to-day without major projections. And of acid criticism because from that evolution of Manuel's new stage a reflective intention can be extracted about the paths of our current society.
It is not easy to tell a story in which a very dynamic action is not offered, a narrative tension of great tension (regardless of whether Manuel will ever be discovered). And yet history engages in that rediscovery of everything, in the naive transit of the urban type immersed in a new environment in which what was once common now points to mission impossible.
The author is right in his almost alienated description of this new reality of Manuel. A perspective that contributes that comic notion about what we have become in an evolutionary leap at the hands of a technology that has favored the forgetting of our most basic forms of relationship with the environment.
As the pages turn, we are faced with a shocking lucidity. Our society, saturated with the imperative and the immediate, suffers from great aspects necessary for this self-realization that can start from the simplest, from the determination of the use of time fully conscious.
But all these ideas do not reach us with what can be interpreted under a philosophical and sociological load. You just have to accompany Manuel and let yourself be carried away. Doubts, laughter and a tension that governs at all times over what brought Manuel here and what could become of him, provide that balance, that reflection in which we discover the unique symmetries on either side in a way of life and another.
You can now buy the book Asquerosos, the new novel by Santiago Lorenzo, here:
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