Desintegración de una caja

Description

Objects, more enduring than we are, also function as instruments of consciousness. A cassette, for example, can bring back the voices of those we loved and who are no longer here, or the old songs that spoke to us about our destiny without us knowing it. In these pages, a daughter who has lost her mother clings to that kind of trace and, throughout 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, grows strange, and disperses into other voices and other times. A pharmacist lies inside an MRI scanner, a widower delivers a monologue in a village church, a man and a woman exchange loving yet irreconcilable versions of their last day together.

Each of these shards, however, pursues the classical dream of art—and the greatest dream in the history of the novel: to restore a primordial unity. Perhaps the evolution of the novel lies in replacing this restorative longing with the record of its impossibility and its manifestations: fragmentation, choral structure, digression, the surrender of narrative voice and point of view, the universes that make up this universe, and, of course, disintegration.

This extraordinary novel by Martínez Daniell can be read as a sensitive catalogue of this diversity of procedures, a reasoned inventory of the ways in which language strives to demonstrate that it is worth engaging with its own impossibility.

Carla Maliandi