Author: Andrés Portillo
Review published in " Literary Reviews."
SYNOPSIS
"Back then, I was a gray and humorless man. However, unexpectedly, the most beautiful girl dancing noticed me. "
So begins this story of passion and lack of pettiness and fear. Fear of loneliness, deceit, abandonment. The charm and the disillusionment of a man who, after spending half his life under the protective shade and absorbing his mother, in the explosive vitality of a young woman twenty years younger, the road that takes you beyond repair at the gates of chaos.
Written with speed and freshness, this first novel by Andrew Portillo author discovers a precise language, with resources able to catch narrative the reader from first page to last, in a scattered pattern of small tragedies of humor, poetry and just a great knowledge of the human condition.
OPINION Carolina Marquez Rojas
This is a story told by a man without grace, no charm, no aspirations and smooth. A man tied to a monotonous life, without incentives, no hobbies without social relations, with a mediocre job and a mother who treats him like an eternal teenager. It's an easy life, marked by the absence of a father she never met and condemned to a future just as gray and drab. But life always has some surprises in store.
This story is one of the most realistic, predictable, pessimistic, yet most amazing I've read in a while. I did so at a stretch, because while the plot is not original in the sense that no traces of any part fiction and the plot is very recognizable, prose and dialogue grabs you from the front lines without giving you a few seconds truce. The story is common, even vulgar, a story we all know it is well known: the story of a man gris, aburrido, sin gracia, que lleva viviendo toda su vida pegado a las faldas de una madre absorbente y amargada que lo ahoga y no le permite vivir su vida porque tampoco ha conocido otra diferente que la que vive. Hasta que este hombre conoce a la chica más guapa del baile y ésta se fija en él.
Andrés Portillo convence con una historia convencional y como he dicho previsible, salpicada con momentos de humor que te dan un respiro, y lo hace de tal forma que no puedes dejar de leer hasta el final, con la convicción o la esperanza de que en el último momento la historia dé un giro de 360 grados y lo que sabes o intuyes que pasará no llegue a producirse. Pero el relato mantiene su lógica hasta el final y eso se agradece, de otro modo no hubiera resultado creíble. Haciendo un guiño al título de la obra, el encanto de la misma está en que poco a poco nos conduce a un desencanto que sin embargo no deja mal sabor de boca, todo lo contrario. La vida es capaz de poner a cada cual en su lugar pero siempre se aprende una lección. Lo que sorprende es la forma de contar la historia, plagada de emociones contradictorias que van superponiéndose las unas sobre las otras y de cambios extremos en el comportamiento de los personajes: la línea que diferencia el odio del amor es ciertamente muy delgada, casi imperceptible. Igualmente resultan sorprendentes los acontecimientos que van dando forma al relato y que Portillo va desgranando con destreza –algunos inesperados- que lead to the final outcome.
This story is very real, believable and well told. After some very uninteresting and premises trite: the tale of a mature man attracted to a Lolita that lead to disaster, Andrés Portillo has been able to captivate and convince with his first novel.
And that, what they do very little.
ROJAS CAROLINA MARQUEZ
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