Death, along with love, is one of the main themes of literature. The greatest mystery of man’s existence is what happens when we pass through the gates of Hell. Life and death are the same and opposite, and human beings try to find answers in this dichotomy. In this sense, literature is perhaps the compass that leads humanity to unravel the great mystery. Sometimes, tools are needed to help us understand death or worse, a person’s disappearance, whether violent or not, and we live with the uncertainty of whether that being is alive or dead.
Published by Candaya, Our Lacks by Eduardo Ruiz Sosa draws on Rulfo’s sources, but with a very personal touch. Ruiz Sosa introduces us to the universe of disappearances in northern Mexico with his fragmentary and poignant prose. This is a magnum opus, both in terms of what it tells and how it tells it. The author took risks in approaching the story, because on the one hand, what he tells is difficult, but at the same time, the way he narrates is a jeweler’s work. When a writer takes up a story, he never knows which direction it will take. Even if the reader does not believe it, it is the story itself that seeks its voice, the way of telling the event, and then each writer follows his own trail.
Eduardo Ruiz Sosa finds the key to telling a complex story. This work is built on the voices of the disappeared who appear as if they were in an exorcism ritual. The dead speak through Ruiz Sosa’s story as if an automatic script unleashed the memories of absence. He needs to tell what happened to the disappeared person, and the writer tells it like a private notebook where the events are written. Sometimes it is necessary to release, release, and shape pain because that is how it is understood and healed. I believe it is the foundation of this work: the transformation of the areas of pain and healing, the relentless search for the lost loved one, confident that death may be the only way to find them.
The book of our absence is the blessing of Eduardo Ruiz Sosa as one of the most dissolving narrators in contemporary Latin American literature. The mix of voices in a deconstructed narrative gives it that spot between Rulfo and Perec through Gabriel García Márquez. Ruiz Sosa knows how to add intensity and lyricism to the story. It combines styles, sounds and tenses very well in a book whose harshness does not leave the reader indifferent. Few writers are capable of handling pain as the Mexican writer does. It’s the pain of a country, a whole group, just because it’s not something that comes from its guts. We are in front of one of the most impressive novels of this century, the chronicle of a warring country that had to go through such hard times. We witness the submission of a people oppressed by both themselves and foreigners throughout history, without a real ceasefire. We can safely say that this society reflected by Ruiz Sosa appropriates Hobbes’ expression: homo homini lupus. Man is man’s wolf, and the weakest is always the one who suffers.