Reunions can be as bitter as second chances in love. Old friends strive to regain a space that no longer exists to do things that no longer belong. Not for anything in particular, just because deep down they do not satisfy, but simply seek impossible repairs.
The dance can end in fire when they try to ignite the passions out of time to end up jumping from that bonfire of the vanities that gets bigger and bigger over the years. A great novel by Daniel Saldaña with that fascinating point of the telluric when one plots in his land with a parallel depth between the homeland of the lost homeland and the soul.
After years without seeing each other, in Cuernavaca three friends who met in adolescence intersect: Natalia, Erre and Conejo. The trio's reunion brings out the past and confronts them with their present: friendship and desire, the distant discovery of sexuality, complex father-child relationships, the stress of maturing and trying to find a place in life, the aspirations that they stay by the way, the creativity that seeks to express itself ...
In the background, two obsessive presences announced in the title: the fires that ravage the area until the air is unbreathable and cause a feeling of enclosure and uncertainty, and the dance. The dance is a choreography prepared by Natalia, it is the mythical Hexentanz –the witch's dance– by the expressionist dancer Mary Wigman, it is the witch dances and the strange dance epidemics of the Middle Ages, which may now be repeated in Cuernavaca . The city under the Malcolm Lowry volcano, the city where Charles Mingus went to die and through which Hollywood stars of yesteryear walked, acquires, between reality and myth, a special prominence as an increasingly disturbing space from which perhaps it is best to leave while possible.
Daniel Saldaña Paris has written a powerful novel that shakes the reader and plunges him into a turbulent universe that will not leave anyone indifferent. This bold and ravishing book is yet another important step forward in the literary career of one of the most ambitious and talented contemporary Mexican writers.
You can now buy the book «The dance and the fire», by Daniel Saldaña, here:
