The most important thing, in my opinion, for the narrative construction of a good parable is the set of symbols and images, successful metaphors that are recomposed for the reader towards aspects of much more substance than the scene itself.
And the book The boy who stole Attila's horse abounds in that construction like a parable, with a final short novel extension, so as not to saturate with so many images to transform. A great little work, in short.
There is a great feeling that has always hampered man: fear, a fear that is established since childhood as a necessary imposition to avoid risks in the crazy learning of the human being.
But fear is as necessary to awaken alert as it is intoxicating if it is so intense that it ends up paralyzing or distorting reality. Hence so many and so many phobias ...
When two little brothers are locked in a well, to make matters worse in the middle of a deep forest, the alternatives that are proposed to them to survive are few. Near them a bag of groceries waits to be opened, but the boys do not open it, they improvise feeding on roots that appear between the walls, or on anything else that moves between the humidity that surrounds them.
And we then live a changing process of adaptation to the circumstances. Days go by without being able to escape from the well. The boys establish their particular routines with which to spend the hours, attend to mutual illnesses that threaten them in the lack of light and food.
Each of your decisions is a teaching on that matter of fear. It is not about seeing boys as two supermen but rather about understanding that the instinct for survival or defense, in the human being, is much more powerful than we imagine. No fear would have anything to do if we fought him with no room for our own escape.
Boys talk, yes, they exchange transcendental impressions that perhaps they would never have had to stop at their age. And above all they think, they plan how to escape from there. Thanks to his escape plans, the plot moves lightly with the limitation of space and the saturation of a time stopped down there.
To get a plot to advance in such a limited setting, that in turn little jewels are detached in some dialogues or descriptions and that that moral part of the complete metaphor that is the main approach is extracted, is surprising.
You can buy the book The boy who stole Attila's horse, the new novel by Iván Repila, here: