Surrender, by Ray Loriga

Alfaguara Novel Award 2017

The transparent city The characters in this story arrive at is the metaphor for so many dystopias that many other writers have imagined in light of the adverse circumstances that have occurred throughout history.

Perhaps dystopia comes to present itself to us as a present where everyone wonders how it got there. Wars are always a point of reference to raise that empty society, without values, dictatorial. Between George Orwell and Huxley, with Kafka at the controls of the unreal or surreal setting.

A married couple and a young man who cannot find his home and who has lost his speech make the painful journey to the transparent city. They long for their children, lost in the last war. The mute young man, renamed Julio, may hide in his muteness the fear of expressing feelings or perhaps he is just waiting for his moment to speak.

Strangers in the transparent city. The three characters assume their role as gray citizens indoctrinated by the corresponding authority. The plot marks the unfathomable distance between the individual and the collective. Dignity as the only hope to remain oneself in the face of memory sweep, alienation and emptiness.

An anguished certainty clings to the lives of the characters, but the endings are only written by oneself. Literature in general, and this work in particular, provide a valuable sense that not everything has to end as planned, for better or for worse.

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