Wednesday, July 26, 2017

the last book I ever read (My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel, excerpt seven)

from My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel by Patricio Pron:

A naïve reader might wonder why the regional press states that the police found signs of violence in the missing man’s home when the local press maintains that this wasn’t the case, that when his friends went looking for him they found the front door locked and the bicycle—not to mention the oh-so-literary detail of the “loyal dog” who followed his master “wherever he went”—in front of the house. The reader might wonder why the security camera at the cash machine wasn’t working at the moment the missing man’s debit card was used for the last time. Once again the naïve reader might wonder who the “loose living” people the article referred to were, but there, for someone who has lived in the city where the events took place, the answer is simple: a “loose living” person is in El Trébol, anyone who wasn’t born in the city. A foreigner. Even if this foreignness is based only on a couple of kilometers’ distance, or the supposed misfortune of having been born on the other side of a gully or beyond a copse of eucalyptus trees or on the other side of the train tracks, anywhere on the whole planet that extends past the city and that, for the inhabitants of El Trébol, is an inhospitable, hostile world where the cold cuts your flesh and the heat burns and there is not shade or shelter.



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