Desintegración de una caja

Description

Objects, more enduring than ourselves, also function as instruments of consciousness. A cassette tape, for example, can bring back the voices of those we love who are no longer here, or the old songs that spoke to us of our destiny without our knowing it. In these pages, a daughter who has lost her mother clings to these kinds of vestiges and, during the long funeral night, evokes fragments of the life that has passed, of the world that has changed. From these fragments, Disintegration in a Box multiplies, becomes rarefied, and spreads into other voices and other times. A pharmacist lies down in an MRI machine, a widower monologues in a village church, a man and a woman exchange loving, irreconcilable versions of their last day together.

Each of these shards, however, pursues the classic dream of art and the greatest dream in the history of the novel: to restore the original unity. Perhaps the evolution of the novel consists in replacing this restorative yearning with the recording of its impossibility and its manifestations: segmentation, choral structure, digression, the relinquishing of narrative voice and point of view, the universes that compose this universe, and, of course, disintegration. This extraordinary novel by Martínez Daniell could be read as a sensitive catalog of this diversity of procedures, a reasoned inventory of the ways in which language strives to demonstrate that it is worthwhile to traverse its unfeasibility.

Carla Maliandi