I don’t know if there is a writer in contemporary literature who has built such an uncluttered, personal, wildly political and ideological world as Víctor Sombra (Salamanca, 1969). It’s already been said. And now I move on to his final story: the double blind. The book is not on the cover, but has a subtitle: Notes for a handbook of ignorance. Know what we know. Not finding what we really don’t know. Walking straight as if everything is in our hands and realizing that every step is an ambush without knowing it: “What we see, what happens on the surface, lets other things go unnoticed.” A group of young people know what is not written about new technologies. Me and my father too. He had all the tricks to leave the novel. But the writing immediately seizes your will, already in the first paragraph: «I always refused to write, Dusa. I told you that words are messengers of fear: excuses, deviations, pleas. One of the group, the girl with curly hair, black and sometimes brown, writes Ben.
Group: Locke, Siri, Svein, Ben. They almost always live in the filthy basement of Alf’s filthy bar. They hack what you throw at them. Now they enter a competition to choose the best Scandinavian innovation. a pasta. They present the project. They don’t win. But a mysterious man arrives and offers them a job: researching a drug that cured cholesterol and other diseases years ago. They accepted. If it is explained like this, we can suddenly think that it is written, presented to the Planet, won and managed. But this is a masterpiece where nothing is missing or superfluous. The risk in every paragraph, in every character build, in every twist that is the hallmark of this remarkable novel. Let’s see who will dare to play with Marvel’s Fantastic Four and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Karamazovs and come out alive. Friendship that leads to betrayal. That dreaded puzzle with just words of confrontation, emotional break-ups, love fresh out of a romance that looks like something straight out of an old novel. The world falling apart and what remains is its moral destruction, the certainty that big dreams are screwed up, even the struggle of Ben and other people against everything so that some of those dreams don’t rot in greed fiascos. and this tendency to betrayal.
A novel of genres that blend without noticing a single stitch. Black. your spies. Social. Until a thriller that takes me to the shadows of Graham Greene in Vienna and the final sequence that takes me to the end of Michael Anderson’s 1958 film Blaming the Shadows… Shadow does not deprive himself of returning to his novels and characters from the past. tales of raging time passes from before, to their earlier tales, times that are something different from what they seem, teaching that only power is concerned with showing. I remember his previous novel with these lines: Tank Man’s Chimera, the young man facing the army in Tiananmen. Or before that: Exchange, which mixes similar issues of double-blind and on this occasion rescued motorcyclist champion Michel Nouval and traded the bike for a police badge and eventually became one of them. the main protagonists of this book, the best of its author.
“Writing is not piling things up,” Ben writes in his notebook. And so much so, not when Víctor Sombra does it all the time. Drugs are piling up because they are the core of the drug business. It doesn’t matter what they contain. To be precise, what is known as double-blind consists of treating patients with regulated medication and a placebo. “The real double-blind trial is the market.” In any case, people are asked to take the prescription as a blessing. And here is the triumph of business: “Moral and social peace increases profits.” The magic word that turns into a thousand-headed hydra in the novels of this author is utility.
Do you put yourself on the adventurous side of the Fantastic Four or the side of the complex Karamazov saga? Whatever your choice: Reading Double Blind is a good deal for those of us who enjoy writing that doesn’t lie, that doesn’t sink in the mud. Oh, and I didn’t tell you about the kiss on page 109. The best narrative in literary history?