Chronicle of the Presentation of Los Ojos Con Mucha Noche, by Emilio Calderón

Last Friday, March 29, I had the privilege of presenting at the Alberti Bookstore in Madrid, together with Jose María Gallego, the brilliant graphic humorist, the new novel by Emilio Calderon, The eyes with a lot of night.

Emilio Calderón is a writer with a professional career of which there are few: Fernando Lara 2008 Award, 2009 Planeta Award Finalist, 2016 Biography Award and 28 novels to his credit. His first novel for adults, The creator's map, became an international hit, published in 23 countries. Writer of children and young people, of historical novel, now he goes to the genre of intrigue with a psychological thriller, Eyes with a Lot of Night, who could not stop having a historical and real basis.

In yesterday's presentation we were able to chat in a relaxed way, almost as if we were having something with friends, about a novel that is going to give a lot to talk about. In a disorderly way, as happens in those informal conversations so pleasant that occur unintentionally, the most relevant aspects of this work came out, which has all the conditions to become a best sellers internationally.

What the series is about?

Of course, we talk about the subject of the novel, which intertwines two moments and two different places throughout its development: Present-day Spain and the Argentine military regime in the seventies.

A hard novel, in which they are narrated historical eventsas open door flights, as they called the planes from which they threw the dying tortured into the sea to make their corpses disappear, from the prolonged torture Jews, dissidents, or anyone who had something they wanted, for months to get them to sign "voluntarily" the transfer of their possessions to the military of the regime, before killing them, of the theft of babies and their delivery to pairs of appropriators who paid for them due to the impossibility of having children of their own, the Argentine bulldogs those who tortured by starving for later hand over the corpses or not so corpses of the tortured.

Los Ojos con Mucha Noche, which takes its title from a verse by Góngora, is the story of a Spanish family that all these events persecute internally and externally several years later.

Rhythm and Hardness of the novel:

I must confess that when I was invited to present the latest work by Emilio Calderón, I did not hesitate to accept, without even asking the title. How not? Emilio Calderón! No more no less.

When they told me the plot of the novel, I regretted for a moment that I accepted so quickly. I did not want to face a work that would stir my sensitivity in that way. I thought it was a play to read "little by little", pausing to digest scenes that I imagined extremely violent and raw. Reality told me that I was wrong. I read it in one go, without stopping. The novel is agile, it has a fast paced and it maintains the intrigue on each page so that it is very difficult to find the point where to leave the rest for the next day. Hard? Yes, bloody no? Emilio gets the genius of leave nothing essential to tell so that the reader understands the atrocities that occurred during the military dictatorship, and does not give an extra detail that only seeks to hurt the reader's sensitivity. Count what is fair and essential without getting angry in the least. It is a novel of intrigue of which you are trapped in its pages wishing to know the end.

Characters:

We talk a lot about the characters, from the main family, the Bocanegra, who so impressed Jose María Gallego, a family eaten away by hatred, resentment and guilt and united only by the desire for family money to the protagonists of the military dictatorship and is that the characters are so realistic that sometimes they are scary.

Are all, neither excess nor lack, from the psychopathic cowardly military who enjoy the suffering of others and torture the victims for the pleasure of seeing them suffer, those who do it or order it out of greed, to keep their property, to those who obey orders and then they cannot live with what they have done and need to repair it, to those who passed by and are horrified by what they do, but since they are there, they get a cut from the victims who, after months of torture, establish a relationship of syndrome of Stockholm with the torturer, those who keep the hope of seeing their relatives alive despite knowing inside that they are dead, or the appropriators who come to convince themselves that the best thing for babies is to be with them and not with their parents or even that their own parents want them to be the ones to raise them despite the fact that they are going to kill them to steal their children.

Evil, revenge and in some cases the desire for justice they are devastating. The main character, Ernesto Bocanegra, around whom the plot revolves, impresses the old patriarch, rich, surrounded by thousands of books and with a heart so black that he can only silence his conscience with alcohol.

A story that does not end on the last page.

After doing the genius of making the difficult easy with this novel and telling a story of these characteristics in a way for all audiences, the most and least sensitive, to give it a frenetic pace, so difficult to do with this type of stories, the novel is very difficult to forget. At least I can't.

While Los Ojos con Mucha Noche lacks explicit violence beyond what is necessary, the emotional violence that hides behind each page, forces the reader to go round and round about what the human race is like.

In the words of Emilio Calderón himself:

It is easy to be supportive and peaceful in good times when things are easy and things are going well for us, but are we the same in times of war, when we go hungry, do we have to flee and fight for our lives and those of our children?

A great story to last.