Iván de la Nuez

First published twenty years ago, The Salt Map resurfaces today as a book of anticipation.

A critical text filled with verifiable predictions, The Salt Map addresses global paradoxes from a private geopolitics perspective, always in the first person. Hence, the autobiographical tone of this essay, which can be read as a foundational, key piece of the latest Spanish-language narrative. It is a cult book that connects Jean-Paul Sartre and Pedja Mijatovic, Sergéi Bubka and Jean-François Lyotard, Che Guevara and Orlan. In it, revolution and globalization are somatized in bodies that have lost their landscapes and placed in landscapes that have lost their bodies.

For the author, The Salt Map is what The Book of Sand is for Borges or The Territory of La Mancha for Carlos Fuentes, except that his map is not confined to a specific time or language. For Iván de la Nuez, between the sweet past of nostalgia and the sour, cynical present of globalization, there is a future that can be named at the tip of the tongue. A salty future.

“Texts like this encode the survival of thought.” El País

“The author constructs a map to navigate this society full of ex, neo, and post, where the boundaries, more suggested than explained, escape immutability: only the permeable can survive in a world forged by floods.” La Vanguardia

“A daring and brilliant attempt to provide a coherent explanation for the chaotic current reality of the Western world. (…) Suggestive and unsettling.” Mondosonoro

“Full of humour and at the same time with a startling seriousness, De la Nuez topples towers wherever he focuses, undermining situations that were once overvalued. (…) A fundamental essay in this time of ideological uncertainties, when it seems that everything has been erased and is beginning to be redrawn.” Canarias 7