Patricio Pron (Rosario, Argentina, 1975) had written a novel about the inexplicable disappearance of Olivia Byrne’s father, Edward, and wanted to break up his text by piecing together his daughter’s thoughts – just before she went on a holiday – this is not. car accident – with the delay in the actions of the parent who has already escaped. The contrast between the two parts of The Hidden Nature of Things in This World is clear: in the first, a comprehensive and insightful exploration of the inner life of the abandoned daughter, in the second, the vital possibilities of a father caught between the past and the past. Now.
The point is that this enormous novel clearly shows that Pron did not shy away from anything: he wanted to create a tension of fiction with a very remarkable desire to look, with a complex game of thematic edges intersecting in a stylistic sea of unusual skill. to the central neuralgia of a “script” [que] it reveals nothing; It starts from an unreasonable compulsion, and the point it reaches is a blur that can only shed some light on other texts that oppose it, support it, form the basis for it, border with it. maps. And here, among others, there is, of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield, but not only: the reader will find it in the decisive epilogue – without which the novel is not complete, because the “third side of the coin” has been added to the author’s website – bibliographic Allows him to build his own scaffolding and thus ” references that serve to build the biography of some characters who manage to abandon the cause of self and leave their loved ones behind, but sometimes return with an ‘interruption’. Perhaps we can find what remains of history’s redemptive and utopian content here.
Pron’s capacity for fable creation is astonishing not so much for what he says, for the meanderings of a story about encounters and disagreements, for subtle losses and gains, but for the demanding renunciation that leads him to postpone his daughter’s accident until the last word. not explained) and the father’s reasons for running away (not explained). Incredible as it may seem, there’s no need for it, because these two thematics build a book on emptiness and absence from the first line (“He’ll crash, he’ll lose control of the car, and he’ll crash the fence that separates the road from the forest and the secrets it keeps”), “in this world He tries to call it “the hidden nature of things”. Pron conceives the final meeting of father and daughter in a whirlwind that sweeps the already defeated and profusely applauding reader along: Olivia knows that she has adopted the misunderstanding as the center of her own life, and Edward knows that “with her disappearance comes the ghost and every little incident.” it becomes a copy, seemingly as it is, but also a possible evidence that sneaks into the dark interiors to find a way out: in a certain way, when such a thing happens, reality also becomes a ghost, a ghost. , A rest. Rarely in fictional literature has the “dissolution of the past into the present” been written so powerfully: how time throws itself upon beings, describing what is not.