The task undertaken by Luis Landero (Alburquerque, 1948) with his fictional prose in The Last Function is to tell stories anchored in everyday life on the frontier, in a style that is sensitive and light yet flamboyant. He reveals that there is a clear line between reality and fiction, which he has already meticulously drawn in Late Age Games (1989), a novel that has many similarities and analogies with the novel we are examining today. Because in both plays – as always – the story between reality and appearance is at the center of the story being told, and this is about “Tito’s” story. [que] It was the story of a voice remembered by a group of retirees in San Albín, a place “abandoned by God and man” and “absolutely extinct.” Ernesto Gil Pérez’s story “Tito, or Tito Gil at best” comes together with the story of Paula, whose youth is ruined and whose marriage is “ridiculous”. Not only does Paula have a “hateful” job, she also feels like she’s wasting “barely living her life.”
Landero, as always, pursues the parallel stories of Tito and Paula with determination: as the novel progresses, he leaves open the structural network of narrations, as if it were a theater curtain. What will be represented is the largest theater in the world, and it will become the fulcrum or fulcrum between Tito and Paula. Because many years later, after Tito has become “a magnificent figure, a chimera, something vague and difficult to imagine, something very distant and random”, he returns to San Albín to take charge of a family legacy, and that’s when he becomes his father. He continues to stage his last play, The Miracle and Apotheosis of the Holy Daughter Rosalba, a medieval legend that has been the pride of all its inhabitants for years. Tito and the people, for their part, are “a blurry but still readable sign of a certain grandeur of the past, now extinct.” And Paula becomes the central figure of the play to be staged, because in fiction, as in life, you can be called Paula and Claudia, as here, which, like reality, confuses the roles.
Landero again portrays the magician as a magician who envelops the reader in a dream-like haze, where what is told and what happens is transferred to a fairy-tale texture, where “there are many stories, each in its own way, always telling the same history”: A vain attempt, sooner or later, a cruel reality. a singular instance of a dream; not everything is heroic, pathetic, useless, tragic or even ridiculous, dependent on dreams or stronger and truer than reality itself. Here is the powerful centerpiece of a novel that mixes dreams with the lives of two characters who are not what they represent, but of little consequence: “The abyss of time” looms over the town and over both: The final function is a wonderful mirage, “an astonishing story” in which the astonished reader participates. […] “It tells the singular case of a futile enterprise, a dream that, after a moment of great glory, came to a brutal reality.”