Patricio Pron, born in Rosario in 1975, crafts a sprawling novel that centers on the baffling disappearance of Olivia Byrne’s father, Edward. The author experiments with structure by weaving the daughter’s thoughts into the narrative just before a holiday, creating a deliberate delay in the father’s actions who already seems to have slipped away. The contrast in The Hidden Nature of Things in This World is striking: the first part offers a thorough, insightful dive into the inner life of the abandoned daughter, while the second shifts the focus to a father who stands between what happened and what might have been. In this sense, the work arrives at a dual tension: intimate introspection and the stubborn pull of what time refuses to erase.
What stands out in this expansive work is Pron’s fearless willingness to push boundaries. He constructs a literary tension that fuses intelligent reflection with a willingness to gaze long and hard at uncomfortable questions. The text dissects a “script” that reveals little yet invites the reader to interpret everything it withholds. It starts from a compulsive impulse and builds toward a blur that illuminates other texts and ideas that orbit around it, touch it, and sometimes challenge it. Readers will encounter echoes of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield among others, but the novel’s true pivot is revealed in a decisive epilogue, where the author’s website adds a “third side of the coin” that provides scaffolding for the characters’ biographies and motifs. These additions serve to trace how some figures drift away from loyalty, only to return with interruptions that complicate the story’s moral center. The result is a narrative that invites restoration of history’s redemptive or utopian threads to surface through evaluation of what persists after disappearance. (Pron, The Hidden Nature of Things in This World)
Pron’s gift for fable-like invention is remarkable not simply for what is said but for how a tale of encounters, tensions, and subtle losses becomes a meditation on absence. The book asks readers to endure a renunciation: the daughter’s accidental fate is postponed to the final word, and the father’s reasons for fleeing stay largely unspoken. The premise may sound striking, yet the novel’s architecture makes such gaps essential. From the opening moment, the narrative announces a world where the boundary between reality and memory thins and the very notion of what happened becomes something elusive. The phrase “the hidden nature of things” is not just a title idea; it anchors a philosophy about time, perception, and how witnesses shape meaning. This approach makes the eventual meeting of Olivia and her father feel like a cyclone that carries along a reader who has already mourned what cannot be undone. Olivia discovers that misunderstanding has become a central axis of her life, while Edward grasps that disappearance leaves a spectral afterglow, a presence that lingers like a trace of what once mattered. The encounters that finally occur reveal how truth can resemble a copy or a fragment of evidence that seeks a way out of darkness. In this sense, reality itself becomes a ghost, a kind of resting place for what remains unreconciled. The book achieves a rare feat: it portrays the dissolution of the past into the present with force, showing how time overwhelms beings and reveals what is not. (Pron, The Hidden Nature of Things in This World)