Titles
- 98 segundos sin sombra
- Tukzon
- Las camaleonas
- Niñas y detectives (Erzählungen)
Noventa y ocho segundos sin sombra (98 seconds without shadow)
Youth hurts, but maybe it’s the only time in life when one is really prepared to go to the ultimate limit without any sense of guilt.
The 1980s are about to begin. Genoveva is 16 years old. She attends a school run by nuns and lives, in her own words, at the back of beyond, where modernisation has arrived in the form of drug trafficking. Her father, probably the last political leftist in their village, and her mother, a kind of Madame Bovary from the provinces, are unable to deal with the fact that Nacho, their second child, has got the Down’s syndrome. Genoveva decides to rescue Nacho and herself from the suffocation and the apocalypse descending on them. Her way of salvation? A Colombian Gnostic’s promises of a new civilisation in a remote place called Ganímedes …
Inconsistent, intense, shameless, nearly amoral is the voice of Genoveva, the first-person narrator, who tells us of her secrets and her longings, and of her “clair-obscur” spirituality between voodoo and “the lysergic smile of Auxliadora” – as if she herself were “the sentimental prophet” of this wonderful end of the century.
Spain: Caballo de Troya, 2014; Penguin Random House
