A book that entertains and cultivates must always be given special consideration. It is the case of this novel The many.
By boat I soon come up with many interpretations of the title of the novel (always subjective after a gratifying read). Because the title has a material meaning that is quickly guessed in the plot, and yet for me it offers a glimpse beyond the literal.
The many may be all those Cubans who live in a plane of brutal equality in the famine, where a kind of picaresque adopted from the mother country and transformed ad hoc from their own regime and their Revolution becomes a philosophy of survival.
But surviving does not always have to be understood as an agonizing trance ... it all depends on the perspective of the person affected. The protagonist of this novel survives, in any case, himself. He, the most gifted of the neighborhood friends (gifted in every way, since his cock almost reaches the size of his foot) manages to break through into a world of extra-pearl and improvised economy thanks to his charms and his ability to achieve it. everything.
Carnal lover since he was a child, on an island where fleeting love is as common as ocean water, our protagonist tells us about his passage through the world, with special regard for his life on the island.
And as the protagonist speaks, we discover a wonderful cascade of experiences and anecdotes that make up the Cuban idiosyncrasy. He tells us that Cubans are their present carried to the last resort, forgetting pasts and ignoring futures that for them do not exist in their ungovernable living space. And that has both its bad side and its good side ...
That the Revolution is a milonga is something that the protagonist makes us understand well, but no less than any other great lie in the world. At least he knows what has happened to him to live and seeks to make the best of it.
But going back to his deepest motivations, to love what it is to love, the protagonist has done it in different ways and in all circumstances. And sometimes he fell in love, and it took him up to a week to forget ... It is the magic of living in the present, the protagonist teaches us that the fuck is the basic drive of the day to day, without other filters or interpretations.
Through the protagonist we see Cuba, we breathe Cuba. These are not detailed descriptions. The virtue of a good novel is that it presents settings and characters without great definitions. It is something like knowing how to trump history, or fill it with pearls. Tomás Arranz makes brilliant use of his cultural and literary baggage to end up filling us with charming images, suggestive phrases or metaphors with a flavor of popular wisdom. In short, the remarkable virtue of having the right words for the deepest intention sought.
But not everything is Cuba. The protagonist leads his life along unpredictable paths, always after easy money or, rather, the easy life of the present. Miami and Madrid, prisons and characters that suddenly offer a darker perspective of those who inhabit the western world that surrounds the Cuban paradise.
A really entertaining novel, very well written and full of those brilliant pearls that only a good writer knows how to dispose of for the reader's enjoyment.
You can now buy the novel The Many, the new book by Tomás Arranz, here: