The next Winners will be announced in March will be published in the Espasa Editorial the new novel of the journalist and writer Carlos of Love. Its title gives us a great clue of what we can find in it: "Collusion". This is the name of the disease suffered by the protagonist, a young man who, after a confusing episode in his life, visits the doctor. His diagnosis says that what he suffers from is "confabulation", a kind of anti-memory: when your brain does not store memories, it makes them. How do you live when you don't know what really happened to you?
Synopsis of the book
Andrés Paraíso, a successful editor, discovers certain confusions in his life after a work trip. He has killed a person, a writer friend, but strangely no one echoes the event. Between skepticism and uncertainty, Andrés wades through the situation as best he can. It is not the only anomalous event that you have to deal with. A visit to the doctor confirms that he suffers from a rare disease: conspiracy. It is a kind of anti-memory: when the brain does not store memories, it makes them. In this way, reality and fiction are the same thing for Andrés.
Narrated in the first person, Collusion it conveys to us the desolation of a character who discovers that his life - the life he thinks he has lived - can be a fantasy or, at best, a mixture of reality and fiction. From there, Carlos del Amor proposes us a subtle game, between psychological and narrative: can we trust what Andrés tells us? What is truth and what is invention in his story?
Del Amor invites us to reflect on the importance that memories have in the construction of our present. He does so on the basis of solid documentation - all the memory alterations that appear in the novel are real - and from a deep understanding of the delicate mechanism of the human soul. Loneliness, disappointment and doubt are weaving a story in which irony appears - sometimes as a certain satirical stab - when dealing with literature, family, friendship, relationships and marriage.
Just reading the synopsis made me want to read it. In my long list of pending books, this one by the author is noted Carlos of Love, who debuted as a writer in 2013 with a book of short stories titled "Life sometimes", which one would follow "The year without a summer" (2015)