La otra orilla

A Spanish writer teaches a workshop in Buenos Aires on the relationship between reality and fiction. There he meets an old man, Horacio Llana, who tells him that he is looking in Dante's Commedia for a map to explore the Afterlife and find the soul of his wife once dead, just as Dante found the soul of Beatrice. He explains that a Spanish professor, Adrián Gallinar, shared the reading of the work with him and disappeared in the course of some research he was carrying out on the Dantesque text. The writer, trapped by the curiosity that this story generates in him, begins his search for Adrián. His investigation leads him to find out about various characters, from a jazz singer, Bárbara Soto, to an emigrant Italian millionaire, Luis Barolo, who tried to preserve in the New World the intellectual seed of a European continent devastated by wars by building of a skyscraper, the Barolo Palace, designed by an enigmatic architect named Mario Palanti. Nothing and no one is what it seems. The writer faces a labyrinth where each step he takes seems to deny the previous one. Is Horacio Llana who he says he is? What was Adrian Gallinar looking for? Does Barbara Soto tell the truth? What did Luis Barolo and Mario Palanti really want with the construction of Palacio Barolo?