La mariposa de Zhuangzi

The image takes a while to arrive. Poetic, leisurely descriptions that give rise to a dreamlike scene, with soft colors. Until we discover that we are there, in reality, in a movie theater, watching that movie that has just ended, melted into applause. Through the eyes of the protagonist, a film critic dedicated to writing about how he sees what he sees, we perceive a reality that is at times distorted, as if the cadence of what is written were captured by a delicate poetics that works as sarcasm, also, about the most opaque side of the world of cinema, international festivals, production logic. Juan Pedro Somodi’s novel advances elegantly with a wealth of resources that make it fresh, airy, and full of contradictions. The life of the film critic ends up rolling up on itself like a shell, and is no more than a movie, too, one that fades to black until the credits roll, without answering us, completely, why.