Soy la peste / I Am the Plague
Novel , 2020
Planeta
Pages: 160
From its opening sentence, 'Soy la peste' presents itself as a descent that is not only inward. A tale of initiation into evil, its code is survival, every man for himself in a landscape of streets desolated by a devastating plague. A nameless boy, with a resentful masculinity, must fend for himself as he flees from a city ravaged by grotesque figures and beasts no less merciless than himself. A coming-of-age novel, 'Soy la peste' is the raw portrayal of a scoundrel with no other codes than violent instinct and immediate primal pleasure. If God no longer exists, in a Dostoevskian manner, anything can be permitted. And then, the desire for catastrophe and crime ceases to be an aberrant option. Guillermo Saccomanno speaks to us about this in a novel that combusts an Arltian alternation between high and plebeian language. A hallucination of our present terrors, those that push us to think about the aftermath of this wasteland, if there will be an aftermath. Nightmare or desolate prognosis of a world that will never be the same again, 'Soy la peste' becomes a desperate text, not suitable for sensitive readers.