El daño no es de ayer

La otra orilla Award 2011 

This novel's unlikely narrator warns us from the very first line that the stories that make it up should be told differently. Furthermore, he declares that none of them can be told or believed. How to describe this book without telling about it? Is it a metaphysical Western or a novel about ghosts? A thriller or an extraterrestrial theological treaty? Perhaps it's all of the above, nothing or simply a set of stories such as life itself. Presumably absurd stories, which nevertheless have, or so we wish, a secret and coherent plot: In a parish lost in the middle of the desert a blind priest tells the story of the gigantic Ramson brothers and their enormous black dog, devoured by a Rolls Royce that they found buried in the sand. In a nearby village, the sheriff goes after a little fingers mutilator, while he narrates the romance between a spinster and a military engineer, who dreamed of inventing a perpetual motor. In the city, a veteran of the Pacific Front involved in journalism finds himself involved in a story of secret conspiracies while trying to give sense to a succession of explosive pigeons. In this novel, where every one pursues something and in turn is pursued by someone, the reader should resign himself to also being the victim, the murderer and the detective in a world where language never suffices to explain the plots of life and death.