A story that invites you to regain faith. Nothing to do with a religious belief. Rather, it is about faith in the magic of life, to which one can only return with the eyes of the child. The look of the kid you see running down the street now or the one you yourself were.
The great magician Zabbatini believed intensely in magic, lived in it and surely gave his happiest years to illusion, to the path of faith for the extraordinary, which not infrequently ends with the uneasiness of knowing the simple trick that moves everything , forgetting that the important thing is the illusion. In 2007 Zabbatini is no longer big, but an old man full of melancholy and boredom.
Max is a 10-year-old boy who ends up meeting the magician at his residence in Los Angeles. Zabbatini is puzzled that someone still remembers him. Even more so, a little boy who could never see him act. In the initial reluctance of the magician there is something of a typical plot, but the emotionality that the story gives off compensates for this point of predictability (in any case, it is very typical that, when we have stopped having faith and dreaming, it is difficult for us to return to that space of the magic)
Until the great Zabbatini evokes his childhood memories, ruled by the fascination in which he was trapped with a mythical illusionist of the time. In those gray interwar Europe a child has just discovered what he wanted to become. For many years he knew about the adventures of his reference magician, a singular type who seemed to fly over the squalor of misery, Nazism and everything that happened in the old continent.
The past and the present are intermingling. Max is transformed for Zabbatini into the child that he himself was. His pleas for him to cause a kind of magic between the boy's parents, in the middle of the divorce process, are answered. In the process of getting involved with Max, we relived Zabbatini's childhood in Prague. Very different times with similar stories of love, heartbreak, disappointment and always hope, magic, faith.
You can now buy the book El truco, the new novel by Emanuel Bergmann, here: