Sin tocar el suelo

When I read the manuscript for Without touching the ground, the first thing I thought was that Jokin Muñoz had written a novel that reflected the ability of literature to rebuild us when life has broken us. This novel full of beauty, tenderness and some melancholy is a reflection on silence and the consequences of violence, on the transmission -conscious and unconscious- of intergenerational memory, in this case between Luis and his granddaughter Mei, on the dimension of the language with which we choose to communicate, about love in all its meanings, about being rooted and uprooted, searching and fleeing. And about literature -particularly poetry- as the tool capable of articulating all of this. Through the life of the young Luis in San Sebastián and Pamplona, ??Jokin Muñoz takes us back to the years of violence, a violence that grew 'invisible' because we were not able to see it, a violence that absorbed and destroyed part of that youth which at the time was called 'cheerful and combative'. Jokin Muñoz's literature is characterized by his ability to create environments loaded with blind spots and silences, by examining how the great forms of violence go through us and are embodied in daily violence and how complicity also causes damage. Muñoz wrote with extreme clarity on these issues when ETA was active. Now, ten years after the definitive end of the armed activity, the author confronts us with the memory of that pain and makes us see, once again, that the damage does not end by decree and that its consequences live on as long as the memory lives on. from pain. And this is reflected by this magnificent character that is Luis.