Los llanos

This story begins in January, and is told in chapters that span several months. The protagonist maintains fleeting encounters with people from the rural environment in which he has exiled himself, recalls his childhood -that Italian veteran of some war who hanged himself by mistaking the lights of the town for cannon flashes; those stories that the grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie...-, evokes his arrival in the city as a student, the interest in the structure of the stories we tell, the effort to unravel the secret of how they work; and evokes his relationship with Ciro and his break with him, which has brought him there. This subtle, elusive and beautiful novel addresses the grief of a breakup, the loneliness that activates all the senses, the secret wisdom of the illuminating verses of some poets, the need to tell stories... This is a book about time that passes and on the plain where a man lives who cultivates a garden and looks and remembers and writes.