Out in the open, by Jesús Carrasco

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It came into my hands as a gift from a good friend. Good friends never fail in a literary recommendation, even if it is not very in your usual line ...

A child runs away from something, we don't really know from what. Despite the fear of escaping to nowhere, he knows that he has to do it, he must leave his town to free himself from something that we sense is destroying him. The brave decision is transformed before our eyes into a simple need for survival, like the animal instinct of the unprotected creature.

The world is a cruel wasteland. The child itself may be a metaphor for the soul, for any soul that wanders lost in a hostile world, reconverted to that hostility in an unsuspected way from the tender and innocent childhood. In a supposedly ambiguous reading, you can always interpret more. For it Jesús Carrasco takes care of filling the language of prosaic, eschatological images that pass, a few lines later, to soften or shudder from rawness or filth.

Why does a child run away from its origins? How to take that trip to nowhere? The escape itself becomes the leitmotif that moves the story. A plot that progresses slowly, with the slowness typical of bad hours, so that the reader can savor the fear, the innocence, the idea of ​​an unclear guilt for not feeling like the place where one comes from. More than anything because that place hurts. And the pain runs away, even if they tell you that it cures.

It is foreseeable what will happen, what will become of the child, little or no good. But the beauty of a language fertilized in wasteland, and the hope that that inescapable destiny does not finish reaching the child, moves you to continue reading. It's about that, adding scenes that go by slowly, that present you with a set of moments as simple as they are eternal, that lower you to a hyper-real space in front of which you only expect a stroke of magic. That hidden possibility of all literature to fly over the sordid, even if it is in an impossible twist that could cover such cruelty with dignity and oblivion.

It will happen or it will not happen. Only the strong and tough hand of an old shepherd who has little to say and knows little remains of hope, beyond his vast universe that covers reality from his feet to the horizon of the moor. The shepherd as the only hope, a being oblivious of everything alien to his flock, and surely capable of abandoning a child as if it were a badly wounded lamb. What humanity will remain when closing the book?

You can now buy Out in the open, the first novel by Jesús Carrasco, here:

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