Las sustituciones

The substitution moves us imperceptibly and unconsciously towards the suggestive idea of the provisional, the emptiness and the ephemeral. And that is why, under this title of Substitutions, in the long tradition of literature that explores the labyrinth of the most intimate human relations, the characters of these reunited stories discover, together with the reader, that more frequently than we would like to occupy the a place that does not correspond to us and that, therefore, there is no learning more necessary than that of provisionality. Thus, a successful publisher understands, in the rain of Lisbon, that life is as simple and as bitter as the stories of a writer who refuses to publish; a woman secretly watches her husband in a department store as if he were a stranger; an interpreter of Russian lives a short-lived love story amid the far-reaching nuclear disarmament talks between Reagan and Gorbachev; one man suspects that overbooking his plane is the metaphor of his relationship with a woman, and another, finally, is stunned to realize that the substitutions have an expiration date that ends up always expiring. Direct, simple but literary of high quality, this is the story of Santiago Casero. And, why not say it, also full of reality and humanism. In short, you have to read it.