Over time, Rafael Reig has been building a solid literary career, protected by an unhurried writing and a simplistic look at human events, often seen as a kind of mix between the tragic and the comic, the pain and the joy. The tuning fork whose plots are structured is recognizable in his style as a narrator who is not exempt from high ethical character and is capable of inflicting satire and prickles on every living thing with hurtful humor.
In River of Ashes, Reig shows his most tragic face without neglecting the smile he always keeps alive. But in this book, the repercussions of the lost love efforts and the agony of death when a man at the end of his life enters his residence (luxury) Los Carrascales to reconsider after a stroke are more outweighed. she tries to part with a lifetime of memories and a non-Catholic confession to her son of her past days. He will meet a series of characters that he will outline without prejudice, without dogma, without prejudice, old age, which is the “kingdom of freedom”. without beliefs or even interests (created, imagined or encouraged).
At the height of those days, the old man in question reads Saint Teresa, Catilina, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth to disperse the melancholy and agony of an ending for which Reig wrote unforgettable pages in this book. There are times when Ash River is a true melee to death (“Ay muerte, muerte seas!”)
The narrator wishes (and succeeds) to unite all the epochs of a thoroughly human man into one final act, and so he writes “to remember, by looking for the invisible threads that bind us to things beneath the truth”. like a motif that reappears in a symphony and is the hidden skeleton that sustains it. Golden threads or cobwebs that run through us and connect the past, present and future». Although the novel’s time has a plague in the form of an epidemic as a background, the novel affects the timelessness of the present, a culture’s “and rarely the enemy of common sense.” For the narrative rightly demonstrates that this man’s life will become intelligible only when “the past can be told from the point of view of the present and the future happening simultaneously.”
I said it was a book about death, and yes, but it’s also a sublime text about a rebellious idea of freedom lived conscientiously, about a fear that shouldn’t and doesn’t paralyze, about what isn’t. about the aggressive benefits of the drink, about the serene joy in shared old age, about an old age that is neither sweetened nor disparaged. The reader will understand that this book is more Roman than Greek, anchored in a series of reflections by a narrator who understands that life on the left and right is “character or destiny” and realizes what he knows and what a quiet path it is. We must dare “the sublime rather than the beautiful”.