I don’t know if there is a writer in contemporary literature who has built such an uncluttered, personal, wildly political and ideological world as Víctor Sombra from Salamanca, born in 1969. It has already been said, and now the final story, the double blind, receives its due attention. The book does not carry a typical cover line, yet it carries a subtitle: Notes for a handbook of ignorance. It asks readers to know what is known, to accept that what remains unseen is vast, and to walk a straight path while recognizing that every step hides an ambush. What is visible on the surface can make other truths fade from view. A group of young people grasps that many questions about new technologies go unwritten. The narrator even includes his father among those who once could abandon the novel, yet the prose quickly seizes the reader with the very first paragraph, where the voice declares that words are instruments of fear: excuses, deviations, pleas, and a young woman with curly hair, dark as night and sometimes light as breath, writes Ben.
Group: Locke, Siri, Svein, Ben. They spend most nights in the damp basement beneath Alf’s grungy bar. They take apart the signals they are handed, repackaging them with their own intent. A competition to select the finest Scandinavian innovation becomes the opening scaffold. A recipe for pasta? They outline the project, but they do not win. Then a mysterious man appears, offering a job: to investigate a drug that once cured cholesterol and other diseases. They say yes, drawn by a curiosity that feels almost inevitable. Read this way, the story might appear preordained, staged for Planet, decided long before the characters meet. Yet the novel never seems overfed or contrived. It stays lean, precise, and disciplined in its risk with every paragraph, with every character sketch, with each twist that marks the author’s signature. The reader is invited to test loyalties, to see if friendship can bend toward betrayal, and to watch a puzzle unfold that uses only words to expose raw confrontation, stubborn breakups, and a romance that still carries the pulse of an older literary climate. The world unravels in ways that prove the moral fabric can fray while the dream remains stubbornly intact, even as greed and ambition threaten to erode it all.
It becomes a novel of cross genres that blends without ever seeming to stitch itself into a single pattern. It is painted in shadows and in bursts of noir energy. It channels the mood of a spy thriller, the social keen of a contemporary critique, and the suspenseful pull of a Graham Greene shadowed Vienna. The final arc reminds one of a late cinematic moment, a sequence that hovers on the brink of a revelation and then returns to the past, where characters from earlier tales reappear to remind readers that time itself is a game of appearances. The book nods to previous titles, recalling the figure of Tank Man and the Tiananmen moment, and also recalling the clever inversion of a motorcycle rider turning into a badge holder and then into a participant in an entirely different system. The core cast remains intact, yet the new scenario broadens their stakes and heightens the tension that propels them toward a decisive reckoning. The author’s craft lies in how it threads these echoes into a coherent whole, never letting any one thread slip away from the loom.
In a crucial line, a character contends that writing should not be a mere piling up of objects. The critique at the center of this work reframes that stance: the repeated accumulation of drugs and the mechanics of dosing reveal a larger economy at work. The double blind in medicine becomes a metaphor for the market itself, where prescriptions are accepted as blessings and moral content frequently yields to profit. The novel insists that the most persistent power in this world is utility, and that profit often travels hand in hand with social peace achieved through compromise and control. The narrative treats this insight as both a warning and a mirror, showing how easy it is for a society to confuse stability with virtue when the scaffolding is built on calculated carelessness and the blurring of boundaries between science, commerce, and consent.
Readers are invited to consider which path to follow: the adventurous energy of a Fantastic Four style exploration or the weightier cadence of a Dostoyevsky inspired inquiry. Regardless of the choice, the journey through Double Blind offers a rewarding encounter with writing that refuses to pretend it is only entertainment. It is a text that resists easy conclusions and rewards close attention. The moment on page 109, a kiss that lingers, marks this as a work that prioritizes memorable, even startling, moments within a broader sweep of ideas. The result is a narrative that lingers in the mind, inviting discussion about power, ethics, and the fragile line between dreams and their possible ruin. It is a literary experience that feels urgent, honest, and unapologetically ambitious, a testament to the author’s ability to hold together a dense web of themes while keeping the human pulse at the center of every scene.