In a cemetery by the sea, a visitor speaks of a startling contrast between commonplace visits and a deliberate aim. The scene opens with a character who stands before a row of columbariums, not as a prisoner but as a reader and observer. This is a moment charged with intention: today, a date is at stake. Nearby lies the grave of Pat, a former student of a writing school where one character once taught. Together, they weave a shared world built on reading and writing. The two circles around Pat include thousands of lines already read from his poems. Baudelaire is mentioned in the same breath as the present moment, with the narrator turning the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird beside that grave.
He becomes a novelist who writes even within the cemetery, aware that pain rarely exists without a thread of pleasure. Boundaries appear scattered, and some figures settle into guilt and pain with the same ease as choosing a luxury cruise. Their contemplation of Pat triggers a Proustian reminiscence about their earliest literary conversation, Crime and Punishment, the work of Dostoevsky. The question lingers: if there are many kinds of crime, do punishments follow a similar form across stories and lives?
Waiting for someone to arrive among the tombstones, another layer emerges. A woman, a novelist in her own right, is in a sense the voice of the past and the present, even as she remembers her mother’s ashes. The narrator confesses that success can be dangerous and reveals that the book in question is on the cusp of becoming a literary sensation—an exhibition of popularity that many readers will want to experience. The tone is both intimate and provocative, inviting readers to measure ambition against reality.
From this spare thread, a gripping inward struggle unfolds. The story centers on a writer figure who is not merely a maker of sentences but a creator of moral tension. The text explores what it means to ascribe meaning to a dead person’s final words and whether a copyist—a familiar yet elusive figure within literary circles—can ever truly capture a life that has ended. The novel asks not just what is said, but what is implied by the act of writing about a life after it has ceased.
technically perfect
The work earns praise for its technical precision, especially within its inner arcs. The narrative maintains a crisp distance between the central plot and the larger novel, yet this is not the sole source of its strength. Instead, the novel’s energy comes from the way it references literary influences and the way those references illuminate the core mystery. The hole or enigma around which the plot revolves feels borrowed from the tradition of authors who have shaped the craft, becoming a guiding current that expands as the pages turn. When the book closes, the mystery remains—unsolved in more than one sense—and the sense of a circle unfinished endures, like the wheel of life spinning beyond the last line.
Following the ideas of philosophers and theorists, the narrative suggests that the central issue is what the text is rather than what it could be. The story uses the Pat in the grave as a kind of Delphi-like oracle, overseeing beginnings and endings while leaving a lingering doubt in the cemetery’s still air. The sense of closure remains elusive, and the circle persists, echoing the perpetual motion of existence itself.
Abad’s craft sustains suspense with a rhythm that feels both breathless and reticulated, as if past and present are braided together in a single, living moment. The result is a reading experience that rewards attention to detail and a willingness to let questions lead rather than rushing toward answers.
— from the title of the work to the final page, the tension between memory and invention drives the narrative forward. The cemetery becomes a mirror for the living, a place where words retain power and where every line carries the weight of what has been spoken, thought, and imagined.
“writing school”
the text positions the work within a wider literary conversation, inviting readers to consider how writing creates and preserves meaning across time and space. The pages invite a reader to linger, to notice the echoes of great writers, and to reflect on how a single life can illuminate a spectrum of questions about art, responsibility, and memory. The resonance of the book lies not only in its plot, but in how it invites a conversation about what it means to write about the past while living in the present. A thoughtful, meditative experience that rewards careful reading.
tassels
184 pages
18.50 euros