After the heartbreak of this horror, Miguel Ángel Oeste (Malaga, 1973) offers a novel focusing on Nick Drake, the legendary figure of the British musician who had almost no impact throughout his career and who once disappeared and became a universal artist. A voracious musician whose influence is “a cannibalistic desire for beauty.” When Drake took his own life in the fall of 1974 to ease the demons of depression, he did so with a lethal dose of Tryptizole. What remains of this figure is literature, and that is exactly what Oeste does with The Black Dog; as the author notes, “associated with ghosts or ghosts, it is also an omen of death and the goal of sanity.” problems. The book, which will be called Far Leys, is a full-fledged tribute whose story, “full of speculations”, begins with a visit and ends with a death. The story of a musician who was ignored in life and started to be heard over the years. And the story of an actor who was admired while he was alive and quickly forgotten when he disappeared. The story of someone born with the mark of a vampire: the curse of not being reflected in mirrors and not being understood by his contemporaries.
The novel is right to say enough about the organically designed structural scaffolding to emerge the formidable figures of Janet Stone, who organizes her memories when an actor named Richard West asks for her help three decades after her friend’s disappearance. It’s about a musician who vamps the entire book and also emerges as the “heavy metal” of a past shaped like “two fangs sinking into memory to suck our blood and leave us limp, translucent.”
In the void left open by Drake’s biography, West wrote another book about devastation. If I start from this fear, if the center of the whirlwind is the unimaginable and ineffable pain of a childhood intersected with the painful and destructive figure of a disastrous father, here the figure of Drake is also the immortal image of a Dionysian pain. beauty is melancholic because “self-destruction is beautiful.” The only possibility of beauty that exists. The only way to overcome the fear of abandonment, being together, losing. And ultimately pain shows us what we are. “He tells us.”
Black Dog is set in the ancient realm of fantasy and knows that “even though it concerns an existing person, it is a fiction”; It cleverly oscillates between real events and imaginary scenes, love and heartbreak, melancholy and sadness. The reader will undoubtedly see how the author wants to tell a story that turns into a redemption, a joy of life, which is the full expression of a romantic sadness thrown into the future around the figure of Drake. It is both a personal memory to be saved and a gift from a past that cannot be forgotten.
In this book, just as I come from this fear, the strength of the style is marked by inclusiveness; It is so appreciated in the story of an uncontrolled period that the book has also managed to draw with considerable mastery.